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I was at the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas in April and then at the IFSEC tradeshow in May. These industry events are always good to get a gauge on industry trends and what people are buzzing about. As the CTO of an open platform IP video management software company, it is very important for me to check out what is the real deal and what is simply hot air.

Not being new to these trade shows, I realize that the media wants to report on the latest and greatest. When a particular concept grabs hold, it can seem like they've all hopped on the newest bandwagon. Let's remember that just a couple of years ago IP was the hot topic, and that is now becoming the accepted standard for surveillance as an undeniably vast improvement over analog technology.

This year, the buzz at ISC West was about the new video compression standard H.264. This standard has been jointly developed by the two international standards bodies ITU and ISO/IEC and is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 Advanced Video Coding (AVC).

40-50 percent reduction in file sizes

Demands in the video surveillance world are increasing for more storage and bandwidth without compromising the high frame rates and high resolutions that are desired these days. More effective compression methods are therefore required. An H.264 encoder can reduce the size of a digital video file by more than 80 percent against the Motion JPEG standard while maintaining the same visual quality. Compared to MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Profile (SP), H.264 typically achieves a 40-50 percent reduction in the size of a video file.

The market uptake of megapixel cameras is growing but the issue has been the storage requirements that such high resolution cameras can generate. The use of H.264 will have a significant impact on this going forward, and my personal view is that H.264 will almost obliterate the use of MPEG-4 Part 2 over a period of just a few years.

Video management solution providers will be implementing this new functionality in the near future, as will all major camera manufacturers eventually. Several of these are already able to present at the shows this spring. From within our own business, I can tell you that Milestone XProtect Enterprise 6.5c will be supporting H.264 by this summer, as a seamless upgrade to existing versions of the software.

Early stages for high performance hardware

On the flip side, H.264 is in the early stages right now. While it provides a great tool for savings in network bandwidth and storage costs, it will only perform with high performance cameras. The compression standard is more sophisticated than previous standards, with the decoder complexity around two times higher than that of MPEG-4 Part 2 SP, which will translate into higher computational requirements.