Security
H.265
Also called: HEVC, smart codec
A video compression standard that delivers similar quality to H.264 at roughly half the bitrate, cutting storage and bandwidth for surveillance.
On a camera fleet, halving bitrate halves the storage array — the largest line item in most surveillance budgets. Vendor 'smart' variants push further by lowering quality in static parts of the scene and raising it on motion.
Two cautions from the field. Aggressive smart-codec settings can soften exactly the detail an investigation needs, and H.265 decoding is heavier on client workstations, so a guard station showing thirty streams needs hardware decode or it will drop frames. Test the wall of monitors before committing the fleet.
Related terms
- IP Camera
- A network camera that encodes video onboard and streams it over Ethernet, typically powered by PoE and recorded by an NVR or video management software.
- VMS
- Software that records, stores, searches, and distributes video from many cameras, and hosts the analytics and access rules on top of them.
- Retention Period
- How long recorded video is kept before being overwritten — set by storage capacity and by whatever regulation, insurer, or policy applies to the site.
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