Anyone who has been researching video surveillance has definitely heard of H.264. H.264 is a video compression standard that provides the most efficient video compression techniques available today without compromising image quality. An H.264 encoder can compress the size of a digital video file by more than 80% compared with the MJPEG format and as much as 50% more than MPEG-4. The high cost of hard disk drive storage makes H.264 video compression a major improvement over previous methods. The chart below demonstrates the space savings. The dark blue line at the bottom of the chart shows the space taken up by video being compressed with H.264, while the red line above it shows MPEG4. The light blue line at the top of the chart shows the inefficiency of Motion JPEG compression.