Should I use H.264 or H.265 cameras ?

These are encoding schemes for video and better encoding results in

(1) Less storage capacity requirement on the storage for storing events for given time. 

(2) Less bandwidth requirement on the network 

Quality wise, even though more compression means loss of information, practically their is not much difference seen by human eye, unless you take a magnifying glass and run it over each decoded frame individually ;-))

Whether you use a camera with onboard SD card storage or hard disk in NVR or cloud storage, less is better (and cheaper). Its better because for a given storage you will be able to store more days/weeks/months of footage (highly desirable) at lesser cost, do less rewrites of flash storage areas resulting in longer life. 

IP cameras may support MJEG, H.264, Proprietary H.264+ or similar synonym, H.265, Proprietary H.265+ or Ultra H.265 or similar synonym, etc in increasing order of compression efficiency. The "+" is a surveillance video specific compression optimization. In general H.265 is 50% more compressed than H.264, while H.265+ can be upto 1/5th the size of H.264 and therefore very attractive to use. It immediately result in less switching load on each link and therefore more cameras and other applications can be supported in one area.

Therefore, if possible get the PoE cameras with the better codec AFAP. However keep in mind, the more compressed the video is, the playback/encoding is tougher. H.264 will practically be decoded by any old computer or mobile device, but H.265/H.265+ needs hardware acceleration for decoding (and encoding) to give smooth playback, which means you need newer generation Intel/AMD CPUs or GPUS with built in H.265 hardware decoding . However H.265 decoding is more easier on ARM SoCs because of their GPUs adopted hardware decoding quite early on. 

A negative impact is expected to happen on battery powered cameras. Because the encoding is heavy it will very negatively impact runtime on single charge and therefore H.265 (and H.265+) type battery powered wire-free cameras are relatively rare. 

All our apartment PoE IP camera system uses H.265+ cameras only. This was a conscious purchase decision made when H.265 and H.265+ were just emerging in the market (we were early adopters). And the only wireless (incl. wirefree) cameras deployed all use H.264.


- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee