MPEG Compression in Camera, does that help?

[personalt 0]

I have a two Tohsiba IK-WB11A IP PTZ cameras. Right not I am just playing with active web cam unless I find some software I want to shell out the big bucks on.

 

I am looking to add 2-3 more cameras. As far as I know active web cam pulls up the jpg images produced by the camera? Some of the new cameras I am looking at have mpeg4 compression built in. Does that help me with software used to record from the camera?

 

Right now I have active webcam record in its native format and then convert the files to AVI/DIVX format to keep the file size down. But I was wondering if a camera with MPEG4 built in will lower file sizes or lower the demand on the computer CPU.

[JMANOFNVS 0]

MPEG4 is a small file but lacks quality on playback. Those IKWB11A's are obsolete in todays market but were a good camera for the price in the beginning. Toshibas recording software is actually the cheapest I have ever seen(besides free) as well as easy to use once you update it.

[cctv_down_under 0]

I would have to disagree with that.... firstly only IP style cameras have biult in compression and yes this will probably mean you can use your browser to view them and probably for free as long as it is one at a time, to get functions etc you need to pay for a package.

 

MPEG4 is actually not very standardised so that means if they have a proprietory codec then it will most likely not be supported by defualt by any other vendor.

 

As for saving space, MPEG4 is one of the best but with PTZ it is actually the worst compression you could possibly use, the reason is that MPEG4 has a lead and an end frame in a sequence with frames in between, how it saves space is to only save themoving bits onto the I frame, (not exactly but the best explanation) in order to do this it must also send grid (not really but close enough) reference data about the parts that have changed, when you move a PTZ EVERY pixel moves and therefore the data created is large, this makes MPEG4 almost useless for PTZ applications.

 

JPEG is much more standardised by most IP platforms and most use a similar base!