H.265 Is Here! Says Manufacturer Aventura

Thanks for sharing. Clearly this is the most advanced system in the history of surveillance! :)

It's good marketing though I am not sure how close they are to actually shipping this (and which of these claims they can actually meet).

We will get in touch with them tomorrow and try to learn more.

Response from Aventura:

• The product is scheduled to ship in 30 days. They are doing longevity testing before distributing.
• H.265 and MJPEG, no H.264 support.
• The cameras will be ONVIF compliant, and they will provide an SDK for third party integration. At the same time, they see the cameras as a motivator to use Aventura recorders

I am stunned that they are saying that they are so close to shipping. I have not heard anyone else claim to be close on H.265. It will be interesting to see!

We'll do a formal post closer to ASIS. Aventura also says they are working on a white paper with more details.

That's a total sales brochure. I'll believe it when I see it. Improved DR? Improved noise levels? What does that have to do with H.265? Isn't that mostly the imager and processing chip?

no H.264 support? Sounds just like another proprietary system, initially atleast.

Most of the claims for H.265 are not true, although H.265 is better than H.264 and has some improvements.

There is a fundamental problem with video compression systems for surveillance purposes. Video compression solutions are developed primarily for broadcast purposes. In the broadcast world the horsepower required to compress is of little relevance, as it only needs to be done once (to generate the program for broadcast). The decompression and rendering is done millions of times in millions of set-top boxes - and usually only one stream at a time.

Surveillance requirements are quite different. We require to compress hundreds, perhaps thousands of channels (i.e. however many cameras you have), so the horsepower to compress really matters - this is what makes IP cameras expensive. Most channels are simply recorded and typically 97% of that recorded video is never viewed and is therefore never decompressed.

Another difference in surveillance is that for a live-monitored system, we require to decompress many video channels at once (for a video wall for example) and as we all know, this requires a great deal of PC horsepower and does cause issues (such as image stutter and dropped frames) when systems are trying to display many mega-pixel camera streams at the same time.

What we really need is a video compression system designed from the ground up for surveillance purposes, taking into account specific requirements like high-noise low-light environments, frequent fixed image backgrounds, minimum motion blur and taking account of evidential integrity aspects too.

It would need an organisation like ONVIF or something similar to establish any new compression technology as a standard, but who would develop it in the first place ? It would have to be some sort of open source movement, but I'm not sure the market is big enough to generate the interest in doing such a project.

So it looks like we'll just have to accept whatever the mainstream broadcast industry develops for itself and adapt it as best we can to surveillance needs, as this is what we have always done.

H265 is fine for recording the megapixel stream and the MJPEG low resolution stream is good for live view in multi camera grids.

Regarding encoding - its done by the camera using an ASIC so can be made low power and efficient unlike using x86 CPUs on a PC.

In fact, I don't understand why many cameras have discontinued MPEG4 ASF because that is probably the best for live view at low CPU.

The dome and box from Adventura have the same shape as current Hikvision H264 models - can someone find out if Hikvision is releasing H265 models?

Also I assume you only get 50% compression efficiency improvement if it H265 High Profile? Are these cameras Baseline, Main or High?

I am also concerned about picture delay - I have seen some cameras that exhibit increased delay when using H264 High Profile vs Baseline (from ~150ms to ~400ms).

There were a signifiant number of manufacturers at this years Infocomm with H.265 offerings for teleconference applications so I do not doubt that this will be adopted. Clear benefits in bandwidth and storage for megapixel cameras.