The rapid development of embedded technology promotes innovation in the field of video capturing, making video surveillance system towards smaller, smarter, more embedded and longer-distance fashion. A video acquisition server is established with ARM board based on S3C6410 processor and Linux served as hardware and software system respectively. Together with a PC client, remotely and real-time displaying video, a long-distance video surveillance system is set up. By control of USB camera through video data acquisition interface, V4L2, the system can acquire images. The encoded image data is sent to clients through Internet sockets. The image is displayed on the client after the accepted image has been already decoded and converted to RGB format. Two methods, dynamic search window and search points-grouping, have been proposed to solve two short points of motion estimation algorithm in H.264. The experimental result shows compared to the original algorithm, the improved algorithm can greatly decrease encoding time and motion estimation time, while maintain the image quality and encoding bitrate. The system designed here can get continued images, implementing video monitoring remotely.