Adaptive streaming advantages and requirements
Adaptive streaming improves the decoding capability and performance of the computer running XProtect Smart Client. This is useful when you view multiple live video streams in the same view.
To take advantage of adaptive streaming, your cameras must have multiple streams defined with different resolutions. This enables XProtect Smart Client to automatically select the closest match to the resolution requested by the view item. Now XProtect Smart Client does not have to scale down the default streams with an unnecessary high resolution. This reduces the load on the CPU and GPU decoding resources and reduces the load on the network.
To ensure the video quality, the closest match is defined as equal or higher than the resolution requested by the view item if possible. This is to avoid the upscaling of the streams. The table below shows the video streams that adaptive streaming selects based on view item requests from XProtect Smart Client.
| Resolution requested by a view item | Closest match of available video streams | |
|---|---|---|
| 636 x 477 | Video stream 1 | 640 x 480 (VGA) |
| 644 x 483 | Video stream 2 | 1280 x 720 (WXGA-H) |
| 1920 x 1080 | Video stream 3 | 1920 x 1080 (FHD) |
| 1920 x 1440 | Video stream 4 | 3840 x 2160 (4K UHD-1) |
When zooming, the live video stream requested is always the one with the highest resolution.
Bandwidth usage is often reduced when the resolution of the requested streams is reduced. Bandwidth usage also depends on other settings in the configurations of the defined streams.