IFSEC Global’s Adam Bannister interviewed Mobotix’s CEO Klaus Gessman and discussed Mobotix’s reluctant decision to finally support H.264 and ONVIF. Mobotix, one of over 300 IP-camera manufacturers in the market, had steadfastly refused to support H.264 instead promoting it’s own MxPEG video format.

In part one of this roundtable discussion Klaus Gessman, who became Mobotix CFO in 2013 and CEO in February 2014, outlined the merits of decentralising their VMS to individual cameras as well as the risks of adopting an open-platform system.

In this second instalment Gessman tells the audience of journalists why the Kaiserslautern-based company is now accommodating ONVIF and the H.264 standard in its latest VMS with plans afoot to do the same in its cameras.

However, he warns, the industry?s de facto video compression format?s limitations will be increasingly exposed by burgeoning technical demands.

Question: You demoed a multi-display, multi-function product for us. The support for ONVIF hadn?t been previously considered [by Mobotix] because the H.264 is an inferior technology. That is a major change ? what is the rationale behind that?

Klaus Gessman: It is a complete strategy change for Mobotix. We used to say that we didn?t care about H.264, ONVIF and so on ? we?ll go our own way with Mobotix, including with our outstanding video codec.

But then you have to convince customers who have already invested in a huge way in ? let?s say Avigilon Vision or analogue systems ? to get rid of those and use only Mobotix systems. Or the other way round: a new hotel is built, then it?s easier for us, because we can say ?please take Mobotix because of our centralised concept? ? and so on.

But we have to take care of the installed base and we can?t always convince customers by saying ?you?ve invested probably ?200,000 or so in your video security solution and you now have to get rid of that and install Mobotix completely new?.

That?s why we?re going for a new generation of video management systems. And the outstanding thing there is gesture control ? and that is the feedback from our NPCs [national partner conferences] and IPCs [international partner conferences] and so on.

That will be a game-changer]. We?ll bring it out into the market hopefully very quickly.

So we decided to make it [the VMS] from scratch and have the H.264 and ONVIF functionality within.

Question: Just to clarify, the cameras themselves are not going to support H.264? It?s the display, the control element?

KG: That?s true for the time being, but we are working on [incorporating] H.264 in all our cameras as well.

But you need to understand that the MPEG Group, which developed the H.264 video codec, clearly stated that H.264 was not developed for security and surveillance systems. They said it was developed for Steven Spielberg ? for the entertainment industry.

What is the difference between H.264 and our own audio video coding? H.264 has high resolution pictures, but within them they have some not-so-precise pictures because they don?t need these brilliant frames, second by second.

To bring the whole Steven Spielberg HD format into one DVD they said ?let?s take every fourth picture as a brilliant, perfect picture and the other pictures are not so important so we can make changes to them.

The security industry is completely different. It won?t help us if one of those lower quality images is actually the moment when someone steals something.

At Mobotix we have a slightly lower frame rate than H.264 but each picture is brilliant quality ? five megapixels ? and you can dive into the detail, zoom in and find out who is in the picture.

But, nevertheless, certain countries have laws saying you have to use H.264 in surveillance projects. So we?ll implement H.264 to win those projects, but we?re sure that if you change to an MxPEG [Mobotix?s proprietary format), you won?t want H.264 again.

So at first we?ll have a video management system, the ability to get the H.264 and ONVIF standard, so other cameras can be integrated with our video management solution.

Then the next step, we would take care of H.264 on all cameras as well. These are fundamental changes for Mobotix.

Read the full interview at the link below: