Difference between H.264 and H.265 in CCTV systems

When shopping for surveillance security systems (recorders or cameras) you’ll definitely stumble upon H.264 and H.265 specs. What do those terms mean? Many people might associate H264 with a security camera system.

Many of the DVRs and NVRs on the market have H264 or H265 printed on the box or displayed at the system’s initial boot. But in reality, many of the higher quality videos streamed online, use H264 compression.

In this article, we will talk about the differences between H.264 vs H.265, what’s their purpose, and what’s recommended to use in CCTV surveillance systems.

What is the difference between H.264 and H.265?

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), known also as H.265, is a video compression standard designed to improve coding efficiency when compared to its precedent, the Advanced Video Coding (AVC), known as H.264.

H.265 or High Efficient Video Coding (MPEG-H Part 2), is a new standard video compression that provides even more improvement than H264. H264 provides improved bit reduction of 57% at 1080p and 64% of UHD or 4K compared to H264. Since all our devices, smartphones to smart TVs, are recording or displaying at a much higher resolution, it is even more important that we have HEVC compression.

H.265 offers about double the data compression ratio at the same level of video quality or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320 which includes the 8K UHD resolutions.

With the rapid spread of the IP video surveillance technology, the current H.264 (MPEG-4/AVC) standard no longer meets the requirement of video encoding for higher image resolution. The next generation 4K UHD and 8K UHD video devices will inevitably become the standard.

H.265 or High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has been gradually adopted in high-definition IP surveillance products such as high-resolution IP cameras, NVRs, DVR. Note that BOTH your IP Camera and your NVR must support H.265 compression to take advantage of these benefits).

The difference between H.264 and H.265 is the streaming bandwidth and storage requirements The H.265 recording is revolutionary because the new video coding standard brings huge bandwidth savings of approximately 50% compared to H.264 encoded content.

In other words, H.265 has the ability to offer a higher quality video for bandwidth-constrained network connection. This means when using H.265 IP cameras, users will experience high video quality with smooth playing, low video latency, and lower storage requirements.

Both H.264 and H.265 codecs work by comparing different parts of a video frame in order to find the ones that are redundant within the subsequent frames. These areas are replaced with short information, describing the original pixels.

What differs HEVC/H.265 from H.264 is the ability to expand the size of these areas into bigger or smaller blocks, called coding tree units (CTU) in the HEVC/H.265. The pattern CTU sizes can be from 4×4 to 64×64, whilst H.264 only allows a maximum block size of 16×16 (CTU is a particular feature of HEVC).

An improved CTU segmentation, as well as better motion compensation and spatial prediction, require much more signal processing capability for video compression but have a significantly less impact on the amount of computation needed for decompression. Motion-compensated prediction, another great progress in HEVC/H.265, references blocks of pixels to another area in the same frame (intra prediction) or in another frame (inter prediction).

Why H.265 Security Cameras are Better?

We’ve listed the advantages of having H.265 security cameras in your setup.

Reduce Bandwidth usage and Storage Consumption

Thanks to their state-of-the-art video compression coding, H.265 IP cameras utilize lower bitrate compared with H.264 security cameras. So for the same resolution and picture quality, an H.265 camera will use a lower bitrate.
On the other hand, a lower bitrate will lead to less required bandwidth and storage capacity.

An H.265 camera can generally reduce bandwidth consumption and storage usage by about 50% or above. Moreover, the camera uses less bandwidth which means your network will not get clogged or slowed down.

Faster Live Feed and Remote Viewing

H.265 security cameras take up less bandwidth which means you should expect to get a smooth live feed and remote viewing experience on the phone while not trading the image quality.

Regular cameras that feature outdated compression codes may lag or freeze when remote viewing or when the network is slow. The newer ones run faster since the video codec is optimized.

H.265 Cameras provide better Image Quality

As explained above, the H.265 cameras compress information in the Coding Tree Units (CTUs), whose sizes can vary from 4×4 to 64×64, while H.264 allows a maximum block size of 16×16.

These larger blocks of H.265 IP cameras can mean more accurate information (thus, picture quality) when compressing 4K videos. This encoding method provides smooth footage streaming without lagging, freezing, or delayed signal.

Longer Recording Time

H.265 security cameras can reduce the storage by about 50%-60%, which means for the same hard drive you will get a longer recording time. If using an H.264 you can get two days of footage, using an H.265 you may get 3 days (this is just for illustration).

H.265 Cameras Provide Multiple Streaming Options

The H.265 IP cameras provide multiple different resolution streams for your options, supporting a maximum of 8K ultra HD high resolution.

If your internet speed and storage capacities don’t allow for such high-resolution videos, the H.265 cameras also allow you to select a low-res stream that will be able to better fit your network limitations.

Conclusion

To conclude this article, we come to the most important question: What’s recommended for the CCTV systems? If your security system supports H.265 then that’s what you should use. For the same hard drive, you’ll get more days of recordings compared to the H.264 compression.

Make sure the camera and the recorder support H.265. Both the equipment needs to support the same compression. It’s better to go with H.265 systems because you can record more days without losing any picture quality.