re: General security camera discussion (was "Unifi Protect security cameras")

OH! I almost forgot to mention one critically important feature. The cams themselves can only be in either Protect mode OR RTSP mode, not both at once. However, when in Protect mode and monitored by a Protect controller, you can enable RTSP on a per-cam basis within Protect. It gives you a unique RTSP URL for each camera, or even a unique URL for each of the 3 different quality streams from each camera, which you can of course consume with any 3rd party recorder or software which supports RTSP.

So while there isn't an official backup solution from Ubiquiti yet for Protect, and these systems don't officially interoperate with other systems, you can use it as a user-friendly frontend and behind it use another system to back up your footage and also run any other sort of processing or automation you want to do. There is ZERO time lag and seemingly zero impact on the CK+ cpu usage. I have ZoneMinder consuming the 1080p rtsp stream coming from the CK+, and live view in ZM next to the live view in Protect the timestamps are basically in sync. The stream ZM sees might even be a half tick ahead of Protect.


So this feature eases most of my fear/hesitation about using UniFi Protect. I get local video storage with a mostly seamless "cloud" experience, apps that are top-notch as far as ease of use, AND I can still run RTSP passthrough to a secondary NVR for backup storage or even do a second pass of motion/object/person detection with a different system.