Review: Anystream Agility

Conclusions
Because of the issues that arose in my testing, I asked Anystream about its H.264 and Flash quality. Regarding H.264, the company has already released another H.264 codec for use in Europe, and it will likely release that same codec in the U.S. in the next major release. In this release, the company will also expose more encoding parameters to the user for all codecs, which should enable configurations that avoid some of the issues that I noticed.

What’s the net/net on quality? Compared against the best in class for deinterlacing and encoding quality, Agility performed well—very well in the case of Windows Media quality—but also showed room for improvement. If I were a potential buyer, I’d find it noteworthy, but not a cause for concern, given Agility Web’s overall feature set, the value proposition delivered by Anystream’s larger product offerings, and especially the stability and performance demonstrated in the render farm tests.