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

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sell me a beta product similar to the echo show.

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They have one. It's $79, non-voice activated, and will make phone calls or show you your doorbell if you push the screen enough times.
No music
No additional skills (yet!)
And it comes in small (white or black) and big (out of stock, probably permanently)

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should i do it?

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can you put your own HDD in the DMPro

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Yes it will take any drive, probably even 2.5" (I know the UNVR will take 3.5" or 2.5" drives). The CK+ will also use any off the shelf 2.5" drive.

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How is the software compared to Blue Iris?

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I have only used BI for a bit just to test because I can't stand Windows (it actually mostly runs in Linux under wine). I didn't try the BI mobile app. Anyway, I know that BI has a ton of options and it's very powerful as a result. By comparison Protect is VERY simple, and it's missing some useful features that some people will miss (and which are hopefully around the corner like lots of things with ubnt). But the simplicity makes it very easy to use and configure. The timelapse scrubbing and person/vehicle detection makes it extremely fast to find what you're looking for. I think it's almost exactly like the Nest camera timeline scrubbing. The only real improvements I can think of in this aspect is if they would allow you to search for motion in a region of the video you select, and timelapse scrubbing with a multi camera view. Aside from that, it's tough to imagine a quicker way to search and review video. If something has been added, removed, or moved, you can easily scrub through days/weeks of footage and pinpoint the exact point you're looking for within seconds.

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and do you have to use UI cameras? touch pill at 200 a camera.

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Yes you do, but you can use most of the cameras in RTSP mode for use with BI or whatever else that talks RTSP. Protect will also pass through RTSP so you can use BI behind it if you want.

And yeah $200 is a bit pricey for the G4 Bullet, but when you realize it's doing smart detections on the camera it's not so bad. That's why the recording devices can be so cheap and underpowered, the CPU isn't really taxed at all. More cameras = more cumulative motion and smart detection horsepower, so you can pile dozens of them onto a UNVR for example which is only $300 without hard drives. If you try to do person/vehicle detection on a couple dozen cameras with BI, you're going to need a beefy machine. You would also be spending a pretty significant amount of time configuring the BI AI, setting up substreams for every camera to run your detection on to save cpu, etc. With Protect you just adopt the cameras and they start detecting (and of course you can edit your motions zones later if you want/need).

So in this way UniFi Protect is no different than going with Dahua or Hik or whoever's cameras + NVR. You get relatively easy setup and the NVR is cheap because all the hard stuff happens on the cameras. It works better because it's all integrated, and even the IPCT guys recommend matching the NVR and camera brands for this reason. A lot of them choose BI for the power and configuration options (and I use zoneminder a lot for this reason), but there will be that trade-off where you have to spend more on hardware and time.

Same here. "Their" drive isn't any more expensive than what I found elsewhere and I they can't blame someone else's hard drive when something inevitably goes wrong.

Anyone have a camera that quit making thumbnails in the timeline?
On the app, in the aggregate shot, it creates a thumbnail for smart detections, but when I go to the camera stream, it’s blank. It’s a g4 doorbell. I had originally set it to record events, and I could thumb through a day’s events on the timeline really quickly. I set it to always record as a remedy, but events aren’t marked on the timeline anymore. My other doorbell works fine. I didn’t change any settings, and flipping a handful of settings back/forth didn’t help.


I’m baffled.



I also was only able to get one working with my chime to start with. I thought it was because I was using larger-gauge stranded electric wire and not getting a good connection, but once I went and replaced everything with bell wire and ensured good connection, it still didn’t work. I confirmed each doorbell worked in each location, but only one of the chimes did. They approved an RMA, but they don’t offer the little chime appliance separate, so the poor company is going to give me a whole new doorbell for what has to be a $15 appliance that goes with it. Unfortunately, the one I listed on the RMA to swap is the one that still makes thumbnails in my video timeline, so I still need to figure that part out.

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So I think only regular motion events show up on the timeline for some reason. I don't think smart detections show up on the mobile or web app timeline,

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You’re not incorrect- smart detections actually populate(d) the timeline with little blue dots that weren’t navigable just to the left of the thumbnail, right of the time, and they would “stretch” as long as the detection was active. Took me a while to notice this. Motion events would create the thumbnail. They both used to work, now neither does.

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On the doorbell that does make thumbnails, do you have a regular motion zone defined as well as a smart zone?

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Yes. I have two smart detection zones and one motion zone with significant overlap on them. My phone gets push notifications when detections occur. The events are recorded. There is a thumbnail on the “all camera” stream/view, but no thumbnail in the timeline of the specific camera in question.

I don't have any G4's set up yet, so I don't have the smart detect. All of my motion events have thumbnails though.

Don't know if you guys have checked the EA section lately, but there are a couple of neat new-ish additions. The G3 Instant and G4 Doorbell have skins now, and there is a conference speaker for Talk.

Also, apparently a marketing email went out that had a couple of as-yet-unmentioned mystery devices in the graphics. One of them looks like it might be a fisheye model Protect camera, and the other looks like a large wall-mounted controller of some sort.



And the mystery Protect product:



Also curious as to why there is a second device that looks like a doorbell.

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Employee of the urgent care in front of me emptied their breakfast trash in the lot before going in, where there are numerous trash cans. Man I really hate trashy people.

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