Testing IP Video - Super Low Bandwidth

Super low bandwidth applications are a niche, so there is not a lot of interest overall.

TeleEye is not a well known company so there is not a lot of interest in them.

Plus its proprietary and, as you acknowledge, expensive.

Finally, lots of people claim to have super low bandwidth codecs but it turns out they are just lowering quality level / increasing compression.

All of this makes me skeptical and not interested in testing this.

Hi Sr?an,

Yes I try H264, compared with SMAC-M

Care to post your detailed findings for us somewhere on the web? I don't mean TeleEye's findings. Their findings here appears to compare HD SMAC-M to MPEG-4 (Not MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC) rather than H.264.

I am always open to new information so for the sake of learning, please provide more details.

Yes SMAC M is old but is better than H264

Based on compression alone? I will refer you to my thoughts on this following your statement below.

Many suppliers offers dual or triple codecs but do not tell the whole story: user can chose what codec but not in the same time. In SMAC M you can use 4 different bitrates in te same time

• I know of a Tier 2 to Tier 1 product that offers 4 streams all using different codecs and frame rates. Some of their products might even be considered Tier 3 and even these inexpensive cameras offer 3 simultaneous streams.
• Secondly, unless all VMSes supported HD SMAC-M your point is moot to the vast majority out there that use the well-known VMSes for very good reason I.E recording, user, analytic, open & other features.
• H.264 is a direct successor to H.263 and it is leading to H.265 developed by the "ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) as ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 and ITU-T H.265". Theforefore, we can expect the industry to move in this direction.
• Given the above, development will be quicker and much more widely supported and adopted than any proprietary encoding method unless such method is supported by say Google - such as WebM (which at this point still trails H.264 as we speak, but WebM is also developed to be used on the web for HTML 5 primarily). Even this has not taken off completely just yet.

With that said, there are some benefits to proprietary codecs and I do not argue that. To give you an example: Geutebrück uses MPEG4CCTV and H264CCTV which are different iterations of the technologies they are based on. Still, the VMS supports normal MPEG-4 and H.264.

The downside is their proprietary technology is only natively available on their cameras unless a transcoder is used.

The upside is that changes in pictures are not referenced to the I-Frame but rather the previous B-Frame. This is not a major advantage, but it helps in the event of a dropped connection or an unstable connection. Normal encoding will reference as far back as to the last I-Frame with all subsequent changed scenery lost.

Still, the technology can only be used on Geutebrück thus making it less relevant.*

I'd venture to say future implementations of encoding mechanisms will resolve most issues exposed by proprietary encoding methods anyway.

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* - Although the VMS allows pulling RTSP from the Geutebrück platform so there is a minor exception. The feature is mostly used for AD-HOC requirements.