If it’s anything like the congestion/clear air zones in the uk: Cameras on every entrance/exit to the zone do ANPR (Automatic Number/license Plate Recognition).

Any plates that haven’t pre-paid, or paid within 24 hours get a fine in the post.

It works really efficiently.

I love Mint for this reason.

When my OS works well enough that I don’t even have to think about it day to day, it’s doing its job.

For a low tech solution, you could use cold chain labels.
They indicate when a temperature threshold is breached. So you’d at least know when a vial was spoiled. They’re not cheap, mind, when you only want a few.

But I know that’s not solving the problem in the way you wanted to!

If you only need to know when a threshold is exceeded, you could make something simple using (for example) an esp with a PAYG SIM card and a temperature sensor.

Then set it up to SMS an alert when temperatures go out of bounds. And pick the SMS up in HASS (various ways). That way, you’ll only be spending a few cents each time there is an issue.

You could also use mobile data if you felt more fancy, and post straight to HASS.

It’s also partly the patent holders for H.265.

H.264 had a license fee, but it wasn’t ridiculous. It was jacked up for 265, to the point that a lot of software houses no longer bundle the 265 decoder license.

It annoys me too: Security cameras often use turnkey H.265 encoding packages rather than more open codecs, which makes dealing with the files using FOSS more of a pita.