H.265 is claimed to be able to reduce bitrate and storage consumption by as much as 50 percent from H.264. There are, however, limitations as well. Before the technology replaces H.264 to become the mainstream, several challenges and issues need to be resolved.
A major topic in video surveillance nowadays is H.265, which addresses the need for more effective bandwidth and storage usage in the midst of 4K or even 8K video. In particular, the technology is claimed to be able to reduce bitrate and storage consumption by as much as 50 percent from H.264. There are, however, limitations as well. Before the technology replaces H.264 to become the mainstream, several challenges and issues need to be resolved.
One challenge facing H.265 has to do with differentiation, considering the two major H.265 chipset vendors offer similar specs on their platforms. Since camera vendors find it difficult to differentiate based on H.265 alone, they differentiate on other features, for example noise reduction and wide dynamic range functions. These are more effectively processed by the image sensor that complements H.265 performance.
“H.265 is basically just a ‘wrapper.’ It is the package that you put inside that makes the difference,” said Pieter van de Looveren, Senior Manager for Marketing Communication at Bosch Security Systems. “The way a manufacturer is able to minimize the amount of noise makes a substantial difference. Although it can never be completely negated, it can be limited significantly using technical design, component quality, and managing lighting conditions. Therefore, customers should pay more attention to the manufacturer’s ability to digitally reduce noise, dynamically adjust the camera’s exposure, offer high dynamic ranges, and other improvement algorithms to clean the image by minimizing noise and optimizing image quality in and around objects of interest.”
Another challenge involves performance. Specifically, the 50 percent bitrate reduction claimed by H.265 applies to a single video stream. But surveillance rarely relies on just one stream. Whether H.265 can offer the same level of bitrate reduction in a multi-stream scenario remains questionable.
Most vendors look for ways to reduce bitrates even further by applying their own “smart codecs” to H.265. “IDIS has gone one step further with regards to compression and implemented its own advanced compression technology, IDIS Intelligent Codec which delivers a further 30 percent bitrate saving on top H.265, thus giving users a 65 percent reduction,” said Brian Song, MD of IDIS Europe. “IDIS then adds a Motion Adaptive Transmission (MAT) technique that reduces the bitrate by intelligently adjusting transmission for both live and record streams during surveillance periods without movement, so that data transmitted can be reduced drastically, when there is no movement.”
Panasonic has similar offerings. “The effectiveness of H.265 alone only goes so far, which is why Panasonic in the latest i-PRO Extreme system has implemented it in combination with the company’s own Smart Coding technology, which takes data efficiency a step further by prioritizing periods of activity over static scenes in terms of the level of video quality recorded, even within the same scene,” said Karen Sangha, Field Marketing Specialist for Security Solutions at Panasonic.
At the end of the day, what the users look for in today’s video surveillance is high resolution, storage and effective use of bandwidth, and H.265 addresses these needs by reducing bitrates and storage usage, which translates into better total cost of ownership for users. While the technology is still in its early days and there are still technical issues that need to be resolved, the interest, and even sales, that H.265 has generated makes it clear that its future potential can’t be ignored.