How to Lower Your Costs by Switching from H.264 to H.265
What are H.264 and H.265?
Before we discuss why upgrading encoding formats can reduce a lot of costs for surveillance systems, let’s be patient and talk about what H.264 and H.265 actually are. If you know well about them or you don’t have any interest, please just skip the next paragraph and read the next.
As we all know, the digital video signals transmit images using a lot of zeros and ones. Yes, this is called binary. A 1080p video at 60 fps can generate around 373.25 MB of uncompressed data per second. Which means a one-minute video can generate around 22T data! The common hard disk for video recording is 1T to 16T, and they cannot store this one-minute original video at all.
Of course, there is no way to let this happen. We use different kinds of encoder format to compress videos. The main ideas of compression is these four blow.
Intra-frame Compression
First of all, a video is many pictures displayed one by one. We can compress every single picture. Each picture is not a random collection of pixels. We can describe them in some special ways. For example, the left part of the picture is color blue! Using this description, I compress half pixels’ data into one short sentence. There are many different ways to cut and describe the picture, we will not discuss here.
Inter-frame Compression
The second method is compression between different pictures. Here is how it works. If a picture is the same as the next picture, we can describe it like this: Hey! Copy the picture! There are always many same pictures in a video, which means we can use this way to save a lot of data. A genius idea is that we set a frame from the middle of a video clip as a key frame (I-frame) and then describe other frames in this video clip based on the key frame and store only the differences.
Lossy Compression
The third compression method is inspired by how the human eye works and how to slack off. The human eye is highly sensitive to changes in brightness, but less sensitive to changes in color. For this reason, we will record changes in brightness faithfully. As for changes in color, we don’t need to record them in that much detail. We can also record some fast-changing moments in a simplified way because the human eye cannot capture them at all!
File Compression
Last but not least, we can compress the video data at the data level. Just like zipping a file, we compress video data.
The differences between H.264 and H.265
Now we know the principles of video compression, how about the differences between H.264 and H.265? In a simple way, H.265 has more details and optimizations in the four areas mentioned above. According to statistics, H.265 can save about 40%–60% of data compared to H.264 under the same conditions. That’s pretty impressive!
The Advantages of Using H.265
If you have read the encoding principles above and know that H.265 can reduce around 40%–60% data transmission and storage compared to H.264, then you can understand why H.265 can reduce costs.
First, it reduces video transmission bandwidth. Whether they are the network cables or the switches you use, the bandwidth requirements can be reduced by around half. All of these result in real cost savings. You don’t need to rewire or add more switches when replacing your cameras with HD cameras because of the reduced bandwidth requirements. What’s more, you can say goodbye to video stuttering and slow loading problems.
Second, you can purchase fewer storage devices. Everyone knows how crazy hard disk prices are! Because of AI, hard disks are much more expensive than before. You can save a lot of money if you can purchase fewer hard disks. The costs of buying racks and cabinets, as well as electricity bills, will also be reduced accordingly.
Sounds great, right? Is there anything we should care about?
What Should We Worry About Before Using H.265?
he main problem is that H.265 is more complex. This is understandable, as it is designed to reduce more video file sizes. It can be a disaster if you use software encoding and decoding. Your computer may not be able to handle this heavy job and videos may become stuck or even not play at all. If you use hardware encoding and decoding, this will not bother you.
The compatibility of H.265 is also a small issue. It always takes time for a new technology (if you call it a new technology after all these years since 2013) to become widely used. Chrome needs hardware acceleration to support H.265, while Edge needs additional software support for H.265. There can be many things that stop you from using H.265. Double-check all the devices and software in your system chain.
Conclusion
In my view, it will be a very good choice if you use H.265 hardware encoding and decoding. Lower cost for data storage and lower cost of bandwidth. You can keep using your old wires and devices if you upgrade the whole system to H.265. For clearer HD videos and next generation, give it some consideration and give it a try! If you still have any problems, you can chat with our experts first. We are happy to hear from you and provide nice solutions for you.