Video bandwidth and storage calculation
Calculate a fictional video recording budget. State the bitrate, retention, overhead and failure capacity assumptions so the result can be checked.
Sources and scopeSource record 25 August 2026
Technical source record: 25 August 2026. Check the linked documentation for current product requirements.
Offline research and planning only; product or deployment acceptance belongs to separately governed environment validation.
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Overview#
Lab class: Offline calculation
Core calculation#
For a constant average stream bitrate B in bits/second over duration T seconds:
payload bytes = B × T ÷ 8
usable storage = payload bytes × overhead factor × resilience factor
Example inputs should be synthetic. A 4 Mbit/s average stream over one day produces about 43.2 GB decimal before container/filesystem/index overhead, retention headroom, replication, failures, exports and other streams.
Required scenario variables#
- codec/profile/level, resolution, frame rate and GOP;
- constant/variable bitrate controls and measured scene range;
- audio, metadata and secondary streams;
- continuous versus event recording and pre/post event duration;
- transport/container/database/index overhead;
- camera count and synchronised peak behaviour;
- edge catch up/retrieval after outage;
- RAID/erasure coding, replication, hot spare and reserved free space;
- retention/deletion policy, evidence holds and export work area;
- network multicast/unicast fanout and client/analytics copies;
- failure/rebuild throughput and maintenance margin.
Exercise#
Build nominal, busy scene peak, outage catch up, and degraded storage scenarios from synthetic low/nominal/high inputs. State whether units are decimal GB/TB or binary GiB/TiB and preserve the range rather than collapsing variability into one value. Comparison with field measurements belongs to separately governed environment validation after privacy review.
Evidence checklist#
- Synthetic input set, units, source assumptions, and calculation method recorded
- Nominal, busy scene peak, outage catch up, and degraded storage scenarios calculated
- Video, audio, metadata, secondary streams, and synchronised peak behaviour included
- Container, filesystem, index, reserved space, replication, and resilience overhead included
- Retention, evidence holds, exports, rebuild throughput, and maintenance margin represented
- Network fanout and edge catch up separated from storage consumption
- Decimal and binary units labelled and uncertainty/ranges preserved