The race to provide video surveillance products with H.264 compression has started.  Manufacturers are adopting this standard compression for digital video recorders, network cameras and video encoders with the promise to reduce video data by up to 50 percent over MPEG-4 compression.

A 50 percent reduction in video data is a remarkable claim that has a big impact on the cost of ownership for a video system. Lower data rates translate to more video storage, lower network bandwidth utilization or higher quality video at equivalent data rates.

I wanted to find out for myself if H.264 can live up to this promise. I set out to find the relative compression efficiency of MPEG-4 versus H.264. In other words can H.264 really reduce video data rates without a reduction of video quality?

H.264 compression resulted from two different groups that came together to define one standard.  The resulting standard is therefore known by several names. H.264 is the name used by the ITU-T which coordinates telecommunications standards for the International Telecommunication Union. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) refers to the standard as MPEG-4 Part 10/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) since it is an extension to the MPEG-4 suite that has been widely adopted by many video security products. The physical security industry in the U.S. seems to have adopted the term H.264 as its primary reference to the standard.

The H.264 standard defines a number of new mathematical features to compress video more effectively than previous standards. Many of the features are computationally intensive and may or may not apply to specific applications. To provide flexibility, the standard defines seven different profiles. A profile defines a certain set of features to fit specific applications. Many surveillance video products are likely to implement the “baseline profile.” The baseline profile is intended for devices with limited computing resources and a requirement for low latency. Other profiles are intended for applications as diverse as video broadcasting, high-definition DVD (Blue Ray) or mobile telephony.