In Video Surveillance the codecs that control the compression of video streams utilized by video surveillance cameras have tremendous impacts on the entire video surveillance system. They affect the storage capacity, network bandwidth and overall system performance. They are the single most important technological aspect of any video surveillance system, and thankfully they keep getting better and better.

The defect industry standard for video stream compression is H.264. The H.264 codec does a great job of delivering high quality video streaming that makes modern video surveillance possible. Without the intelligence and compression that h.264 and 265 provides the technological and budgetary barriers to video surveillance would preclude all but the most urgent of systems.

Take this fairly typical and very small video surveillance system:

• Resolution: 1080p Full HD
• Frames Per Second: 30
• Scene Complexity: Average (50%)
• Motion Activity: Average (50%)
• Recording: 24/7
• Retention: 90 days

Without any compression codecs like h.264 or h.265, just sending RAW uncompressed video files this level of system would be required:

• Required Network Bandwidth:41.71 Gbit/s
• Storage Space: 42,515.28 TB

This is just for 30 cameras at 1080p! (Use our Storage And Bandwidth Calculator to check your own surveillance requirements)

Storage Savings With H.265 And H.264

Now apply the power of the h.264 codec and that same video surveillance system that required almost 42 Gbit/s of network bandwidth and over 42,000 Terabytes of storage capacity now becomes a reasonable and manageable problem to solve.

Using h.264 compression codecs this level of system would be required:

• Required Network Bandwidth: 165.38 Mbit/s.
• Storage Space: 164.60 TB

That’s a whopping 250% reduction in the bandwidth and storage savings with h.264 compression. It’s easy to see why every modern professional video surveillance system uses h.264 compression to stream and store video from IP Cameras for video surveillance.

What Are the Storage Savings of h.265 vs h.264?

Now apply the power of the newer h.265 codec and that same video surveillance system that seemed pretty good at only 165 Mbit/s of network bandwidth and only 165 Terabytes of storage capacity gets even more efficient and powerful.

Using h.265 compression codecs this level of system would be required:

• Required Network Bandwidth: 128.39 Mbit/s.
• Storage Space: 127.79 TB

A respectable 22% reduction in storage savings with h.265 compression over h.264. On a relatively small 30 camera system a 22% bandwidth and storage savings would not be a huge deal. After all not every IP Camera nor video management system supports h.265 compression as it requires more processing power at the edge and on the recorder server NVR.  However, when you scale up the cameras or the resolution then the savings of h.265 start to add up to serious numbers. Triple these numbers to get to 90 cameras and that solid, but not earth shattering storage savings of 37TB becomes 111TB. Even using super high-end 10TB drives that means you need at least 14 drives (assuming best practices RAID 6 double parity drive protection). So if you are installing new IP cameras and a new video surveillance server then it can pay to ensure your cameras and your VMS support h.265 complression.

Video Management Systems That Support h.265

Support for advanced features such as h.265 compression, remote management, active push notifications, and other professional security features is concentrated in the handful of market leading VMS companies that are leading the industry forward. At this time these are the top rated Video Management System (VMS) companies that support the required feature set of a modern surveillance system so you can take advantage of the storage savings with h.265. Arxys is a Certified Partner with all of these leading VMS providers.

1. Milestone Systems
2. ONSSI
3. Genetec
4. Avigilon
5. ExacqVision

If you are looking to get the most bang for your buck out of your new video surveillance system be sure to build in support for h.265 compression to take advantage of these storage and bandwidth savings. Arxys VideoX Appliances have the hardware acceleration required to support native h.265 compression and decoding for video motion detection.