Reolink vs Dahua

A friend wanted to keep local recordings of his security cameras for 90 days. We did the math and found that he'd need a 4-disk NAS. Instead of going that route, I suggested he re-evaluate his use of Reolink cameras. Why though?

His (and all?) Reolink cameras use CBR encoding – they emit a constant rate of data whether the scene is noisy confetti or a pitch-black room. Insane, right? In contrast (ha ha), basically all better cameras support VBR. The video encoder's bandwidth varies based on the complexity of the scene, as you might expect. This isn't exactly groundbreaking technology in 2026.

We got a single, relatively affordable Dahua camera for him to test with, installed it, and ran it overnight. I wasn't going to suggest he replace all of his cameras without first verifying that the space savings would justify it.

The end result is that instead of 600MB per 10 minutes with Reolink (24 hours a day), we achieved 135MB per 10 minutes for 17 hours a day (daytime – lots of activity), and 30MB per 10 minutes for the other 7 hours a day (night time – no activity). Said another way:

Reolink: 86GB / day
Dahua: 15GB / day

A single external HDD attached to the recording computer would be able to save around 200 days of footage from each of his cameras. So, interestingly, it might make financial sense to upgrade your cameras in order to achieve a longer recording period than to buy additional storage space.

As an aside, I'd expect these same results working with Hikvision cameras too – which may very well be what my friend settles on.