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  • Bitrate Calculator - Security Camera Bitrate Calculator | GetSCW
Tool:

Security Camera Bitrate / Bandwidth Calculator

Use this calculator to determine how much data watching or recording your cameras will use.

Fill out the calculator, find out your storage needs:

If you're in the security industry, check out our partner program.


Input the total number of cameras you will want to be able to view remotely and the calculator will determine the amount of data being sent. Remember, all cameras come with a secondary "Substream" used for streaming the cameras at a lower quality while retaining full record quality.

Related Guide: What Internet Speed Do I Need for Remote Viewing Security Cameras?

Want more information about what internet upload speed you need to watch your security cameras remotely? Here's a guide about our minimum recommendations and with information on how to test your network connection speed at both your sending and receiving locations.

Related Guide: IP Camera Bitrate and Compression

Not all 1080P cameras are created equal. Here's a guide with more information about what happens if a camera's processor has a slow bitrate.

Stuck on the H.265 Option?

video compression

Our 2018 line (and a few other company's 2018 lines) records with a new more efficient file H.265 compression, so that you can stream video about at almost half the normal bitrate with the about the same quality recording. H.265 replaces H.264. H.26X is block-oriented motion-compensation-based video compression. In plain english, H.26X, rather than updating the whole frame at every refresh, splits the screen into horizontal and vertical grids and only updates the grids with changes. H.265 increases the flexibility of these grid containers so that surveillance video stream uses less bitrate than H.264. (The new line is backwards compatible with H.264.)

If you don't know what encoder version you have, use H.264 as that is more common.

Use H.265 and Substream Viewing To Lower Upload Requirements

When viewing cameras with H.265 and substream you dramatically lower the bitrate and therefore the upload speed requirements of your network.