How Did Dahua Get So MANY H.265 Supported Devices On Milestone? They Have A 3rd For Just Them.

H.264 smart codecs have much more impact on bitrate than non-smart H.265. You're likely looking at about 20-30% lower bandwidth if you're comparing straight H.265 to H.264, tops. That's what we're seeing across multiple manufacturers.

By contrast, an H.264 smart codec will likely cut your bitrate by 30-50% in most scenes, and as much as 90%+ in low activity scenes. 

Yes, you can use an H.265 smart codec to eke out slightly more, but switching from H.264 to 5 has significant drawbacks:

• H.265 is more intensive to decode. In some cases more than double the CPU load in our tests. That's going to have massive impact on client specs and could require hardware HEVC decoding in a lot of cases where H.264 is decoded on the CPU just fine (this is an actual issue with one of our machines, for example).
• ONVIF support is sort of in limbo right now. Yes, you can stream H.265 via ONVIF since last year, but most VMSes don't support it and it essentially requires testing to confirm it works. This should be remedied when Profile T is adopted, but it's going to be late 2018 or into 2019 when we see Profile T cameras/VMS become common. Until then, VMSes are essentially doing direct integration for all H.265 cameras.
• I'm a little cloudy on this, but I believe H.265 is tricky on iOS devices and likely Android. New devices are including hardware decoders, but software support seem limited and most of what I've found recommends transcoding to H.264. For those using mobile apps, having to set up an H.264 stream for it will add yet more traffic to the network.

All of this is why many manufacturers have effectively ignored it. Yes, Hikvision, Dahua, Hanwha, Uniview all were pretty fast to market with H.265, but Axis, Bosch, Avigilon, etc., have either just started releasing gear with it or have not yet begun.

Yes, possible. But I'm not a great target. 

Excuse the probable idiocy of this question, but by saying " recorders" -- do we mean their NVRs? If so, I'm currently using Milestone, and kinda digging it. It hasn't even been a week yet.

I'll grant, I'm surprised that Bosch puts their dewarping plugin behind a paywall - after you've presumably spent $1,250 on the camera... but other than that, I'm sure I'll only learn more about it during the course of this month. 

I'm very hopeful to find no 'deal breakers' and more and more ways to grow fond of the system. 

Would I be mistaken thinking that using a different companies recording server behind a firewall would offer any protection? Or is it the cameras themselves that allow someone access to my video? 

(As always John, thank you for taking the time to chime in)  :)

The Sony is about $5k on eBay...

The Axis is like $7500. 

The Dahua is about ~$400 from my dealer. (We're still establishing prices).... and even if it sucks, more people bringing bigger sensors to market is a good thing. :D 

Regarding Dahua IPC-HF8835F  I believe using 4/3" Sony IMX294 which is in sensor area about 8x bigger than IMX274 (1/2.5") which you probably referred as  ~1/2". So sensitivity improvement among Sony Starvis is expected big and much bigger when compare to older sensor. Price is not nice as Truman expected, realy not 400USD, say 4x~5x more. Sure still much lower than mentioned Sony/Axis.

Splain it to me Lucy... 

I mean, smaller sensors in photography tend to do worse in low light; given that hikvision cameras ARE superior to most cameras (and certainly with a price parity) ... its hard to imagine this wizardry isn't a product of some very wise mathemetitians and software engineers... 

Or, do you just think their sensors are SO superior, that their 1/2.5 is just better... than other companies <1/2" sensors?