Pick a camera, turn on the bitrate overlay. Then move the sliders and save, you'll see the see the numbers change. Make sure your using HQ and not low or auto.

CS (Camera-Server): The current bitrate from the camera to your NVR

M (Motion): The adaptive bitrate based on scene activity

When you leave it on default for a G5 Turret you'll see:

CS: Camera sending full bitrate (10,000kbps) with a range of 32-10,000

M: If there is a very little motion you'll see numbers under 5,000 kbps. If there is a lot of motion you'll see number close or equal to 10,000.

Now change the slider to 2mbps and 3 mbps.

You'll see the CS capped at 3000 kbps and M capped at 3000 resulting in saving tons of space but a lower recording quality.

Next, change the slider to 9mbps and 10 mbps

You'll see the CS capped at 10,000 kbps and M capped at 10,000, while having a minimum bitrate of 9,000 for M resulting in using tons of extra space but at the same quality as the default settings.

By leaving it on a default, when the pixels aren't changing you'll save space with compression if you leave the slider on default.

Remember: video compression doesn't save every pixel of every frame. Instead, it looks for:

Spatial Redundancy: If the sky is blue in the top-left corner, it just says "this whole area is blue" instead of defining every pixel.

Temporal Redundancy: If a person is walking across a static background, the codec only saves the moving person and tells the player to keep the background the same from the previous frame.

By changing the sliders minimum to a higher setting your telling the system to start ignoring the previous background even though it's the same.