This white paper describes some of the key considerations encountered during the development of the ICS-8580 rugged video streaming XMC board, with a particular focus on the selection of video codec, which is one of the critical decisions in any video streaming application. An analysis will be made of the two most common video codec’s, JPEG2000 and H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10) to determine which one is better suited to solving the demands for greater computing capability, ruggedness, power consumption, flexibility, and physical size limitations specifically with unmanned vehicles.