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

Just wanted to close the loop and thanks again guys. Had 5 cameras installed yesterday - the four Lonnie has and the floodlight. Plus the doorbell. One of the cameras is bad out of the box so getting it swapped today. A couple of other kinks to work through, but I'm pretty pleased with everything.

Thanks again for the help.

So I managed to capture video of this guy walking around my entire house the other night. The police, on the other hand, were not as lucky...

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Whoa

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Yeah. He opened by back gate and casually walked around the back yard for about 5 mins. Even spoke to one of my cams saying "Don't worry I don't have any ill intent." That is exactly what I would have said had I been caught on someone's camera... Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night.

Funny thing is, he never approached the house, and stayed near the fence line almost the whole time. He final went to my neighbors yard (the one who's house is visible in the frame), and hopped the fence to my 3rd neighbors yard (the one you can see behind our trailer). Weird.

I tried looking through all the comments, but didn't see my question:

Is there a continuous record video camera that overwrites itself weekly or monthly that someone can recommend for residential use?

They would be outside, and probably hardwired. I'm just starting to look around, I appreciate your help.

A lot of people like Reolink because it honestly cannot be beat in terms of price/performance and the app is not terrible. They do person/vehicle detections, but the bad news is they charge monthly if you want "rich notifications", which just means the phone notification you get will include a thumbnail photo of the event. If you don't pay then you'll still get a notification and you'll just have to tap to load up the video.

I still have a preference for UniFi Protect. A lot of people think they are overpriced, and maybe they are but not terribly so IMO, but for years they have had the best app by far and nobody else seems to be trying to come close. There are no monthly fees and you get rich notifications for free.

I've never heard of anyone disappointed with their purchase of either Reolink or UniFi.

There are many other options, most priced about the same as UniFi or higher, and generally the tradeoff is the apps suck but the video quality is better.

Finally a reasonably priced Ubiquiti PTZ G5 PTZ

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This will be very nice if true.

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That + the new ability to offload to NAS means that a Protect license costs $300 (price of NVR) for about 20 cameras.


I’d argue that’s a bargain.

In other exciting (to me, anyway) CCTV news, Uniview has some brand new cameras called OwlView that take nighttime color images to the next level.




Model numbers are:

Turret IPC3624SR-ADF28KM-WP
Bullet IPC2314SR-ADF28KM-WP


Street pricing is $339, but you can email me at my username at gmail if you want to talk about, uh, different pricing.

ONVIF support is now in the official Protect release, though it is still very buggy (my Uniview cameras don't really work at all, though reolink and amcrest/dahua seem to work alright).

ONVIF has profiles for all sorts of things, including basic motion as well as AI events, but Ubiquiti so far is only supporting basic streaming and recording with no events at all. There are many questions/complaints about this, and Ubiquiti is not clarifying what their plans are, but people have gleaned from their YouTube videos that there is a device in the works possibly called the "AI Key".

If the rumors are correct, and I think and hope they are, the AI Key would be a device dedicated to processing video streams and generating events. That would allow any camera that puts out a basic RTSP stream to be used with Protect, complete with their UI for configuring motion and AI events. It could also upgrade your old G3/4/5 Ubiquiti cameras to add AI capabilities like license plate and face detections like the AI series of cameras. Additional AI processing also opens the door to more advanced analytics that are offered by some of the enterprise VMS players.

A device like this would be absolutely huge IMO. I think Protect is still by far the easiest system to use, to the point that I don't think anyone else is even trying.