H.264 Problems - Reflection in Field of View

Notice the table surface moving. Although the table is static there is motion due to the reflection. The phenomenon of motion in the reflection of this table is known as the I frame interval. This is one downside to H264 and MPEG4 that professional video technicians need to be aware of.

The easy fix is to go to the camera menu and lower the interval to 1 second. You typically will not see it then. You can then keep decreasing it if needed. The timing of the pattern shift on the table points to a H264 phenomena sometimes call pixel shift.

Modern video compression schemes rely on a reference frame (I-Frame in H.264) and sub frames (P-Frames). The sub frames do not contain full picture data, just picture change data. The total picture gets updated at I-Frame time and any pixels that were off or changed will look like jitter or shifted on the screen I believe if you check the H.264 refresh interval setting (I-Frame refresh setting), it will correspond to the actual "pulsing" effect of the shiny random patterned table.

This effect can be reduced by setting the H.264 setting to frame rate priority and bandwidth to unlimited and making sure quality setting is set high. This utilizes the highest bandwidth because more of the picture is getting changed at each P-Frame time. If you have the bandwidth, you can try out other settings - frame rate, higher bit rate, etc.

Many systems we design have plenty of bandwidth available so the use JPEG is preferred which has many good video features and avoids some of these anomalies thus reducing tech time.