An Intelligent, dynamic, long-term digital Surveillance Media storage System (ISMS), proposes an intelligent, dynamic, digital media storage mechanism for digital surveillance applications that can analyze media streams in real-time and provide flexible, scalable, and self-adjustable encoding and indexing mechanisms based on actual needs for digital surveillance systems. The system includes several subsystems, such as: (1) a media stream retriever/receiver; (2) a content-based description generator; (3) an intelligent engine with metadata description storage and media file storage (4) an event manager; (5) a media stream writer; and (6) an encoding optimizer.