H.265, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is a video compression standard developed by the JCT-VC organization. It is one of the potential successors to the widely used H.264 (AVC). Comparing to H.264, H.265 offers approximate double the data compression at the same level of video quality. H.265 also supports maximum video resolution of 8K (UHD) 8192 x 4320 pixels.
H.265 is an extension of the concepts in H.264. Both work by comparing different parts of a frame of video in order to remove redundancy. The primary changes for H.265 include the expansion of the pattern comparison and processing blocks from 16 x 16 to 64 x 64 pixels, improved variable block size segmentation, improved “intra” prediction within the same picture, improved motion vector prediction and motion region merging, improved motion compensation filtering and an additional filtering step called sample-adaptive offset filtering. Effective use of these improvements requires much more signal processing capability for compressing video, but has less impact on the amount of computation needed for decompression.
An extensive range of WAMA IP cameras support H.265 compression. The following comparison chart illustrating typical storage requirements of H.265 and H.264 at different video resolutions and recording frame rates.
2MP Cameras
| Recording Frame Rate | Recording Duration / 16 Cameras with 12TB Storage | |
| H.265 | H.264 | |
| 25fps | 36 – 48 days | 18 – 24 days |
| 12fps | 48 – 58 days | 24 – 36 days |
| 6fps | 72 – 96 days | 36 – 48 days |
5MP Cameras
| Recording Frame Rate | Recording Duration / 16 Cameras with 12TB Storage | |
| H.265 | H.264 | |
| 25fps | 18 – 24 days | 9 – 12 days |
| 12fps | 24 – 36 days | 12 – 18 days |
| 6fps | 36 – 48 days | 18 – 24 days |