Is Telestream Episode the best swiss army knife of encoders?

I've been looking for a good all-purpose encoding program for a while now, since Compressor can't handle Flash or WMV without external plugins (which I don't currently have--I use Cleaner 6 for WMV and Adobe Media Encoder CS4 for flv). Episode looks like the perfect solution for my needs (at $500)--I'm just wondering if I'd be better off purchasing the Flip4Mac ProHD plugin for $180 and the FlixPro plugin for $249 instead.

With either solution (Episode vs. Flip4Mac/FlixPro), I can access the codecs via Compressor. Would I better off sticking with a one-vendor solution (Episode) or saving a few bucks ($75-ish) for the DIY route?

I'm leaning toward the Episode route, but I'd value any input about these particular options or other options I may not be considering. Thanks!

There are a lot of options out there, and to be honest I've only used four of them. So I'm not the best person to say here. But in my experience, Cleaner and Squeeze are useless pieces of garbage, Compressor is excellent and Episode is top-of-the-line. Whether you need to step up from Compressor to Episode depends largely on whether $500 strikes you as a shockingly large sum of money or not. I know that as a freelancer I never would have considered Episode, because Compressor did 90% of everything I needed and was effectively free, being bundled with FCS.

Let me just say this about Episode, though. A few weeks ago I bought a copy ? well, the company bought a copy; I just filled out the paperwork ? and started using it. To my dismay, I discovered a problem with converting one format to another. Episode would just crash on me, seemingly randomly, when I was dealing with this particular format. I dropped tech support a line via their Web site's contact form, and got into a great back-and-forth about the issue with Linda, one of their support people.

Long story short, she sent me an email just a few hours ago to tell me to update my copy, because the just-released-today version 5.2 includes a fix for the bug I'd reported.

Telestream has outstanding support, which to me makes their software worth its price and more.

Great story Jeff. Always nice to hear that.

Michael Horton
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Excellent. thanks for your thoughts.

this is a business purchase--the boss is already on board and has given the go-ahead. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking any other solutions out there that would better suit our needs. This is more about improving workflow than it is about achieving higher quality, though we'll take any quality improvements we can get!

I think we'll probably pull the trigger in a day or two to give some other folks time to respond just in case

it IS the Swiss Army Knife? of encoders and the latest has support for XDCAM MXF files -- you can set up a batch export to every format Episode supports- and keep working on something else - it grinds away nicely in the background -- we frequently create FLV, various qt and wmv files all at once for clients streaming - 16:9 4:3 it does it all at once -- well worth the investment. Andy Field - FieldVision productions