What are H.264 and H.265?

H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) are the most widely used video compression standards. At the same image quality, H.265 can save about 30–50% bandwidth and storage compared with H.264, but encoding/decoding is more computationally intensive. This article compares their principles, performance, hardware support, and licensing costs to help you choose the right codec for surveillance/NVR/streaming systems.