Who designs these things anyway? Why are there so many video appliances, encoders, etc. coming out providing the new H.264 compression, more processing power and no additional cooling but a small heatsink. What about cooling fans? Hasn’t anyone learned from the issues with powerful laptops?
The advantage of using DVS Design Tools to calculate storage and streaming video requirements as opposed to using straight mathematics is that the select calculation algorithm for specific codecs are included and can give you a fast and easy comparison between compression technologies.
The IP VIDEO SYSTEM DESIGN TOOL and the AXIS Camera IP calculator are two good choices.