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Wireless video communications are a growing segment of communications in both commercial and defense domains. Due to the lossy nature of wireless channels, they require powerful error correction for successful communications. In the commercial domain, ever more people worldwide use video chat, and watch videos on portable wireless devices, while in defense domains, surveillance assets are growing rapidly in numbers, providing real-time motion imagery intelligence. In both domains, the transmission of high-quality video is of vital importance, and a variety of both source and channel codecs have been developed, separately for each domain and application. Throw in tight bandwidth constraints (e.g., 500 kbs), and the challenge intensifies. To give a fair chance to H.264, to operate at such low rates, we first restrict (convert) the videos to 480p resolution. In this paper, we explore the space of video codecs, encryption, channel codecs, and lossy channel models, and use a database of aerial surveillance video we collected, to find the best practices within this large search space. After some preliminary material, we focus attention on the two most common video codecs in use: H.264/AVC, and H.265/HEVC, ask which is better to use in lossy comms, where we mainly limit bandwidth to just 500 kbs. We perform simulations in Rayleigh fading channel models, use signal-to-noise (SNR) levels that stress transmissions, and use powerful Polar and Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes to correct errors. Since the channel varies with time (as does our simulation), we aggregate over 100 simulations for statistical convergence. Without channel errors, H.265 would be easily preferred due to its superior coding efficiency. With errors, this is still true in our simulations, but the result is far more subtle, and unexpectedly depends in part on using encrypted video. H.264 is in fact more resilient when there are high errors and without encryption, while as quality improves to usable levels, H.265 takes over. With encryption, H.265 wins at all channel Eb/No (~SNR) levels, and even pro
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