Streaming Media - April/May 2008 - (Page 98)

review Anystream Agility By Jan Ozer The term “industrial-strength” is probably overused, but it’s definitely appropriate when describing Anystream’s Agility Web encoder, an extremely robust system that delivers more than adequate video quality along with stellar stability and performance. Price: $10,000 (base product) For more information, contact: Anystream www.anystream.com Figure 1. Preprocessing options are extensive. They’re accessed via tabs on the left of the preprocessor tab. Recently, I wrote a story about high-definition streaming for the 2008 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook (pp. 163–170), and people from two of the five companies that I interviewed described their Anystream systems with such reverence that I had to take a look. Anystream’s products enable primarily large media clients to efficiently deploy and protect their video content over a range of output mediums and distribution platforms. The center of their range of services is the Agility system, which automatically acquires video from various supported sources; adds watermarks, subtitles, bumpers and trailers, and other graphics; and then transcodes the video into the necessary formats and delivers it to the selected distribution outlets. While Agility has modules for broadcast, video on demand, and live delivery (including scheduling and ad insertion modules), I wanted to look at Agility Web, the transcoding engine for web delivery of on-demand and basic live streaming. The basic product costs $10,000, with upgrades available for additional capabilities like tape-based capture and control. Agility Web can work on a single computer or expand into a multicomputer rendering farm. For the record, Anystream sent a rackmounted 2.0 GHz Dual Processor, Quad-Core (E5335) with 2GB of memory, affectionately called Violet, for my testing. You can run a single node of Agility on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, but if you want a multinode network, as I did, you need to run Windows Server 2003. Input/Output Agility can input files used by most common editors, including Avid, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Quantel, and formats common to broadcast servers such as SeaChange, Leitch, Omneon, GrassValley, Sony, and Quantel, including GXF, MPEG-2, eQ, sQ MXF, IMX, SAF, and VSR2000. Frankly, I don’t know what half of these formats 98 STREAMING MEDIA April/May 2008 are or do, so if you work with an exotic editing format, check Anystream’s website for compatibility. I do know that the system works with most lower-end tape formats, including DV25, DV50, DVCPro 25, DVCPro 50, XDCAM, and HD XDCAM, and can input most common file formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-4, QuickTime, AVI, and WMV. It can even grab video from a VOB file, the format used in DVD-Video. The system can also capture SDI, DV, component, S-Video, and composite video, as well as SDI Embedded, AES, and analog audio, including controlling most decks. Some of these features are included in the base price; some, like most tape-based capture functions, are extra, so be sure to identify your requirements and price your system accordingly. As you would expect, output formats mimic input formats, with the addition of live webcasting for Real and Windows Media video, and on-demand production of Flash 7 and 8, H.264, Windows Media, and Real Video. I focused my codec-related testing on Flash 8, H.264, and Windows Media Video. Workflow As with most high-end encoding systems, most users will work with Agility via watch folders. Specifically, you’ll drop files into a designated folder for processing defined by a compression or production type beforehand. You www.anystream.com

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Streaming Media - April/May 2008 Table of Contents Beyond the Bottom Line Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers (Not So) Instant Karma MSN Autos Revs Up Video Production Dow Finds the Right Streaming Chemistry Why Video Is Changing the World A Decade of StreamingMedia.com What's Your Digital Media Strategy? Blasts From the Past: A Decade (Almost) of StreamingMedia.com Headlines Analyze That A League of Their Own: Streaming Media All-Stars Where Are They Now? Wanted: Sexy HDTV That Connects to the Internet and Services All DVRs Anystream Agility Inlet Technologies Spinnaker S3000

Streaming Media - April/May 2008

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