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

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my open source Protect clone that will work with any ONVIF cam.

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So I have assembled a small team of devs to help with this and figured I'd bump the thread to get some feedback since I'm already kind of bumping heads with one of them.

I've expanded my desired feature set to solve what I believe are some unaddressed issues in the current state of the market. Many/most of these issues might actually be addressed, but in these cases the solution costs many thousands of dollars. I believe they can be solved with an open source application.


1. Shitty UIs.

Nothing comes close to the Protect vertical-scrolling timelapse feature IMO (I believe the Nest app does similar). Searching and playing back recordings is a pain in most apps. I will try to clone Protect.


2. Limited options for upgrades/expansion.

With a typical consumer or small business NVR, you have a set # of channels and that's that. If you end up needing more later on, you either have to replace it with a larger one and either lose all your recordings or it's a huge pain to save them, or you can add a second NVR and deal with the pain of a split system forever. Ubiquiti has plans to solve this problem via what they call "stacking" NVRs, but this feature has been "coming soon" for more than 2 years. There is a similar problem with most VMS software that runs on a computer. At some point adding another camera will cause it to run out of resources, and you have the same decision to make.

I think this problem can be solved with a peer-to-peer architecture. You can start with an NVR as cheap and low-powered as a Raspberry Pi recording from one camera, and if you add cameras and the Pi runs out of resources, you can just add another and join it to the p2p network. They would then cooperatively balance the load, and offer storage redundancy at the same time. This would of course also work with something like a NUC, or a desktop PC, rack server, etc., and you can mix and match your hardware and there should be no real limit to growth. If you add a machine with a GPU, the network would intelligently shift any object detection that you may have running over to that node.

Additionally, a p2p architecture makes it easy to merge two distinct sites by simply running an instance in "the cloud" and connecting both networks to it.


3. Time-based recording deletion sucks.

If you have 1 week of storage capacity, you're going to want to see what happened 8 days ago. If you have 1 month of capacity, you're going to want to see something that happened 5 weeks ago. This happens over and over if you deal with enough surveillance video, and I think we can do it in a smarter way.

Surveillance video, like a lot of time-series data, still has a lot of value after lossy compression. So instead of a hard cutoff before which you have no video whatsoever, we can just delete the high quality version and leave a low quality one. This method alone can stretch a month of high quality recordings into a month of high quality recordings and a year of low quality recordings.

I typically like to record 24/7 with motion and other events highlighted, just because it's often useful to prove that something *didn't* happen at a given time. But after a while that's less valuable, so we can only keep the video where something happened. This can stretch a month of high quality video into a month of 24/7 video and 2 or 12+ months of high quality event video, depending on activity.


4. Data redundancy and durability options are limited.

With typical NVRs you have the option of no redundancy or RAID, and backups are a pain in the arse. I'm sure there are high dollar VMS systems with nicer backup systems, but again you will pay dearly for that and it is unlikely that they offer the type of system that I'll propose.

The main problem IMO with using standard redundancy and backup options is they just treat data as data, but not all surveillance video is created equal. I will create a rule-based system which assigns a sort of importance value to each segment of video. Inputs might include the camera, whether there is motion, whether a particular object was detected, how old the footage is, etc., and the output of the ruleset will be a number which approximates how many copies of the video segment should be stored. Maybe you have a camera for which you want 3 copies when people are detected, 2 copies of 24/7 footage for a week, and 1 copy of older footage. The result is highly durable important video, and a long tail of video of lesser importance and durability.

And of course with the p2p architecture your nodes can figure out the best place to store a given piece of video, whether it's across multiple machines on site, in the cloud, or at another site. Backups and recovery become seamless and automatic.



I realize this is a lot, so if you made it to the end congrats.

And I realize a lot of home users don't care about this stuff, but I think an open system as described above can offer a lot of value to businesses of all sizes. I also think that if I or a 3rd party would offer a NUC type of device with 4 or 8 cameras, a lot of consumers would go for that, especially if it would eliminate the decision of "should I get the 16 channel just in case" since you could just stack a second box and automatically support more cameras, more storage, and added data safety.

Anyway, thoughts would be appreciated, even if just a to encourage me to possibly spend a few thousand hours of my life on this

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The latest Protect beta out today added smart detection for G4 Instant, thankfully.

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Thats cool I have 3 deployed so I'll take it.

There's a new camera in EA called AI Theta. YouTube

It's not an original concept, but neat nonetheless. They have basically separated the camera lens from the rest of the electronics so that it can be deployed discreetly. Looks like it comes with 2 interchangeable lenses, a 4K "standard" view and a 12MP 180 degree fisheye lens.



Also, if anyone has one of the earlier model UNVRs, if it has not failed yet then expect it to fail within a year or two. These things booted from a cheap arse USB thumb drive mounted internally and glued to the main board. They wear out fast and then the machine fails to boot, the LED flashes white rapidly. You can RMA and ship it back, or if you're impatient you can change the thumb drive yourself for cheaper than the cost of shipping (assuming UI doesn't cover that cost). Doing this will of course void your warranty.

It's possible, but I'm not sure how to tell without voiding your warranty and taking a look inside. I'm not sure if there is a serial number lookup or not. Support can probably tell you if you can reach them.

What I do know is that almost every product in UI's store is in stock at some point pretty much every week if not multiple times per week, except the UNVR which hasn't been in stock in months. My assumption is they have stock, but they aren't selling them and instead are keeping them on hand as replacement units for all the RMAs coming in.


Make sure you have a cloud backup for your config so if you do need a replacement then setting up the new one will be simple.

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I wish that they treated Protect like Network and let you bring your own device.

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They could charge a per-camera licensing fee for non-UI cameras and make some money. I think the reason they don't is they obviously don't have control of the firmware for ONVIF cams, so they wouldn't be able to achieve the seamless and clean interface they want.

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They do, however, RMA like champs.

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And they make a product simple enough that my wife loves it.

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Nothing else that I've tried comes close IMO.


I am still working on kinda sorta replicating Protect using generic ONVIF cameras though. I may have settled on a recording backend called Moonfire. It looks like a really solid foundation for recording from rtsp streams and playing back recordings. The UI leaves quite a bit to be desired, though, but it's designed so that the UI can be swapped out. And again, I am a pretty shitty dev, but I think I can copy Protect's vertical scroll timelapse player.

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I have two upcoming projects that I want to install a UNVR for (one with 20 g3 flex + 8 g4 bullets), another with about 6 g4(p?) bullets and a few domes (which are about the only other device I don’t see that often. I guess the demand is high).

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Looks out of stock at the moment, but the UNVR has been coming in stock pretty regularly for the last week or so. I picked one up. A lot of the cameras have been coming in stock and remaining in stock for longer than they have been, so either demand is waning or supplies are picking up.

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I'm still wondering why the Flex is stuck at G3.

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There is now a PoE adapter for the g4 instant. I wonder if they don’t consider it “integrated” now.

hows the g4 bullet? i need to add a camera outside.

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In stock now and has been for about 3 hrs if you still need one

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After waiting for over a year, I was able to finally snag the UNVR this morning. Still available which is surprising. Either this drop was a ton of inventory or the scalpers don't see the profit in it anymore.

Now just need the doorbell pro and viewport. I wanted a G4 dome too but now have to decide if it's worth waiting for the G5 dome.

Surprised they are a doing G5 dome while the Flex is still stuck in G3.

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UNVR : the scalpers don't see the profit in it anymore

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doorbell pro the scalpers do see the profit in it

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Good luck lol. I want one too but im good with my ring for a long time till I luck out. The last drop people were saying it was in stock for maybe seconds.