IPVM Bandwidth / Storage Calculator Tool Generate Broad Range

IPVM often gets asked if they have a bandwidth/calculator. So far, they do not, with the primary reason being that it is difficult to be accurate, since so many variables come into play.

This is true. Still, all people don't require the same level of accuracy, since they often intend on padding genourously the estimates, or maybe are just playing "what if" scenarios. Some might be looking just for a double check, to insure that their math isn't spectacularly wrong.

IPVM doesn't *need* to have calculator: There's a lot of free calculators out there already, some better than others. Some contain numerous parameters that must be entered, some have alarmingly few. But the answers are generally all over the place.

Here's an idea for a calculator that I haven't seen yet, but might be useful.

The basic idea is to allow one, some or all number of parameters to be entered in the calculator. Then instead of giving a single number as an answer, a reasonable range based on the missing information would be given.

Example: Providing only the resolution and frame rate of the camera might yield an answer between 25 and 250 Gig per day*

Maybe not too useful for anyone except double checkers and ballparkers, but not necessarily inaccurate either.

If you don't like the broadness of the range returned, you can add whatever info you might have to reduce the variance. Adding in scene complexity, or average motion or Smart codec etc, might bring the range down to a useful size.

So basically a calculator allowing a few to many variables as input, and returning ranges corresponding to the amount of specificity provided.

*these numbers are just rough examples to show the range concept, they would likely be different.

A range is definitely an interesting idea and eliminates the most fundamental problem of calculators - the false precision they return.

The challenge still is that errors come in two fundamental forms:

Input limitations - the user is not certain / clear about what scene they have or compression levels, etc. The scene is the big one as even seemingly slight variations have big impacts on bandwidth
Model performance limitations - the user generally knows the model but the calculator does not know the model's performance. For example, once we test a model we know a lot more about how much bandwidth the camera will consume (roughly speaking some are hogs, some are not, there's more than that of course but this is a key part). So a significant part of that range is the calculator (in this hypothetical case, us) not knowing how that camera performs.

That leads us to: should IPVM learn how and incorporate how different cameras consume bandwidth / respond to different scenes (i.e., how bad they are at night, etc.).

The alternative is a simple calculator that forces the user to estimate the average bandwidth expected.

I'd love to do the former and incorporate real knowledge of each model but that is somewhat of a herculean task.