3xLOGIC

What is Aztech?

Aztech is a special video codec developed by 3xLogic to specifically meet the needs of digital surveillance video. You can only get the Aztech codec at 3xLogic.

Why is it special?

Aztech excels in two main areas which include megapixel IP cameras and the latest H.264 compressed video.

Megapixel IP cameras produce excellent detailed images, but the size of the jpeg files produced are 10 to 100 times the size of standard security video files.

The Aztech codec is designed to recompress these huge files down to the size of standard security video and yet maintain the detail, resolution and quality of the megapixel camera.

This makes megapixel a reality today without a significant investment in storage and makes 3xLogic’s Vigil solution the most cost-effective megapixel solution on the market today.

Check out this blog post for information on why megapixel is competitive with traditional video technology.

 

H.264 Compression technology is the latest offered by most DVR and IP camera manufacturers. 3xLogic offers it as well. H.264 is a flavor of MPEG4 designed to effectively compress standard and high-resolution video.

However, while H.264 is the best codec offered by the security industry, it has it’s flaws. H.264 was designed for real-time streaming video which is 30 images per second. Most security applications allow recording at less than 30 fps. In fact, even 7-10 fps is considered fast enough for most surveillance applications.

When you record at less than 30fps with H.264 you end up with a lot of overhead in your video due to this flaw which effectively means that even when you slow your recording rate down, you do not get as much savings on disk usage. When streaming the video to your remote laptop, you are having to transfer video that is much larger than it should be.

This is all due to the fact that H.264 was not designed for these types of applications.

With the Aztech codec, it was designed to provide the same benefits of H.264 at ALL FRAME RATES! This means that 5 fps video recorded with our Aztech codec will be a fraction of the size of H.264 video.

For the user, this means you can increase the quality of your image, reduce your hard drive usage significantly (sometimes down to 1/10 of what you would have needed with H.264), and your remote streaming experience is highly more enjoyable.

Check out the megapixel page for a chart of real-life file size comparisons from an IQeye megapixel camera at a Shell station. www.3xlogic.com/megapixel

High Quality Video

Thanks to Tim at AAA Security for sending in these sample clips. We will work to get more examples, but rather than canned video from our labs, take a look at some real video captured by one of our dealers.

The clips are from 2 megapixel cameras that were compressed using the Aztech codec. If you have experience with megapixel you know the normal size of each compressed image would be around 150k. This means the first clip you see below which has 315 frames would normally be around 47 megabytes in size. Compressed with Aztech it is less than 5 megabytes for a 90% reduction in size.

You will need our video player to view the video and you can download it here.

Clip 1, 315 Frames, AAA Security Parking Lot, 4.7 MB (approx 90% savings)

Clip 2, 154 Frames, AAA Security Street, 10.7 MB (approx 50% savings)

Due to many variables including user configuration, file size can vary greatly, but overall the Aztech codec will reduce your storage requirements by 50-90% as shown above while maintaining the quality of your analog, IP or megapixel video.

Do you have security video you’d like to send us? Click here to submit it and maybe we will feature your video!