1) I've heard a lot of people on here complain about H.264+, not that it doesn't work, but various video artifacts (flashing and fading, random image loss, dropped frames), etc. I've personally never tampered with the codecs on any of my cameras. I've left everything codec wise to its default and have had no issues. I have a mix of old and new 2032s (the classic Hikvision bullet) running on 5.2.0 (before + was implemented), some on 5.2.5 that might have it, and some brand new 3145 4MP domes which support up to H.265. However all of my cameras are grayed out at H.264 from the NVR (I can't change them), but they work perfectly fine. That is likely an issue with the recorder and not the camera.
Ideally, best settings Are going to be those that max out the capability of the camera with respect to image quality. The resolution you'll want to shoot up to 4MP as those appear to be 4MP bullets. There are some people on here who swear by 1080p and nothing more. The only reason I can see their point on this is aspect ratio, and you get your full 30FPS (I'm personally content with 25, but to each their own). 3 and 4MP is a square (4:3) while 1080p is wide (16:9). In my case, details are critical, and the ability to zoom in and see details (digital zoom, after the fact) trumps having a widescreen image that fits my TV monitor perfectly (it's stretched but that doesn't bother me). And that zoom feature works much better with more pixels. Even though depending on what you're objective is, more pixels does not necessarily mean better image quality overall.
I personally use VBR and not CBR because it helps to save space and extend time before my HDDs fill up. The difference is CBR will transmit a stream at a fixed bit rate that you determine regardless of motion activity in the scene. If it's variable, less activity means less storage consumed. It spikes only when their is an increase in pixel changes (motion). So it's generally more lean on bandwidth consumption. Also, if it's fixed, and your fixed bitrate is lower than what the camera might need for a high activity scene, you'll notice the image struggle a bit because it's capping the bandwidth lower than what is necessary. At the same time, idle scenes will waste bandwidth and make the video files much larger unnecessarily. That's why with variable you can set the image quality from lowest to highest and everything in between so the camera will adjust things as needed. I always set them to highest of course.
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