Ultra265 & U-code 2.0
2019.06.29

From ADSL to 4G, from Resistive Touch Screens to OLED, electronic products are in pursuit of higher and higher definitions. Started from the D1 resolution, video surveillance products now reached 4K which is 25 times higher. However, the development speed was held back by the increasing need for storage space and bandwidth brought by higher resolution video.

Take the 4K camera as an example, common industry standard bitrates is 8Mbps for H.264. Hence 591GB storage space is needed for 24 hours of video monitoring for 7 days. It is much larger than the storage space in a PC’s hard disk. Meanwhile, the camera needs no less than 20Mbps bandwidth to support both live view stream and storage stream computing. It’s much higher than the global average wire speed and only slightly less than South Korea, which has the fastest wire speed in the world.

To balance the need for HD surveillance and corresponding storage and bandwidth cost, and to keep pace with the development from H.264 to H.265, Uniview spends enormous efforts to exploit HEVC coding standard and invented the patent coding technique U-Code. The combination of U-Code and H.265 is the unique technology - Ultra 265. Ultra 265 is an end to end solution which can save up to 95% storage space and 75% storage cost, brings great convenience to users. What should be concerned is the U-Code has been updated into U-Code 2.0 recently which is more powerful and intelligent than before.

Ultra 265 – More than a deep compression technology

Unlike conventional video compression technologies which try to reduce storage costs by sacrificing resolution and frame rate indiscriminately, U-Code 2.0 chooses to use “IRP” (Intelligent Region Perception) to detect motion in each frame. Hence, scenes containing interesting information could be preserved while the other relatively static areas such as lawns, white walls could be squeezed to save storage.

In order to reduce bandwidth, U-Code 2.0 applies dynamic GOP (Group Of Pictures) technique, which suggests the time interval between critical I frames of the GOP can be dynamically adjusted by analyzing the picture variety trend. In other words, as the surveillance picture tends to be static, the GOP is elongated, while it tends to be movement, the GOP becomes shorter. Meanwhile, it uses V.I (virtual I frame) to ensure that media has a keyframe that contains critical information so that the NVR can run the Frame Accurate Search and Quick Playback.

Furthermore, U-Code 2.0 also supports frame rate controlling for different video content, we call it the dynamic frame rate. It is used to automatically maintain high frame rate monitoring for many moving objects, but decrease the frame rate for few moving objects cases. No more details will be missed for complex surveillance pictures, and no more storage will be wasted for simple monitoring situation.

Additionally, U-code 2.0 is able to be applied on all streams, which means it can reduce bandwidth for multiple uses. By combining U-Code2.0 and H.265, Ultra 265 can squeeze up to 95% bandwidth and storage space.


Comparison between H.264 & Ultra 265

Ultra 265 - brings great benefits to customers

Under the same configuration, Ultra 265 only costs one hard disk to store the same video record which needs four hard disks under H.264, saving 75% storage cost. Customers would benefit from both storage cost and deployment cost from Ultra 265.

Moreover, Ultra 265 retains the image quality enhancement brought by H.265, reduces the image distortion caused by code compression to a great extent, optimizes image blur, trailing smear and rough of stroke edge, and improves the accuracy of VCA. Besides the advancements list above, Ultra 265 also breaks the bottleneck of HD resolution. It enables customers to make full use of Super HD surveillance products like 4K under current bandwidth and storage deployment. Ultra 265 is the best choice for customers to enter into the era of Super HD.