ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I was wondering, which is better in terms of bandwidth use: to send video stream using mpeg or continuous jpeg images? Does it make any difference?

Thanks,
Sergio.

Never done a like-for-like comparison, but you can screw down mjpeg to really very little by limiting the size, colour and fps at the camera end. I have 7 640x480 b&w streams camera-limited to 5fps running through a normal 100mbit lan with no signs of choking. ZM chugged quite a bit with them until I upped the hardware to cope.

You can also adjust the compression on mjpeg, but I understand it's a tradeoff between bandwidth and increased CPU utilisation.

I think technically mpeg uses less bandwidth as it just sends the differences between frames each time, plus other optimisations. However mpeg streams often seem to suffer from lag problems so I prefer the immediacyand simplicity of mpjpeg streams.