The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
The processing can happen within the camera, and it's nice when it does...but that doesn't mean that the only other option is something cloud-based, like some might assume.
Open-source NVR software like Frigate can do things like the object-detection/license plate/face recognition game on local hardware, with the cheapest available IP cameras. It's just a program that runs on a computer with a network and some storage and some processing ability like a GPU.
Those cheap cameras don't have to be trusted; with things like VLANs, they can hang out on the Group W bench where they have no access to anything important or the outside world. :)
(But yeah, it does represent much more of a DIY effort than something from UBNT does.)
I do like the onboard AI, and it works well for entity detection (like people). We haven't found the face detection to be very reliable in outdoor security applications. There doesn't seem to be a way to correct/combine classes if someone's detected as multiple individuals on different occasions, so we end up with the same person detected as 5 "unknown"s. This is not a hard problem to solve. You'd just allow embedding matching to different face groups, but it's annoying as a user.
The cost is just insane though. $4-$500 for a camera that I can get equivalent specs for $50-100.
IME those sub-$100 Chinese IP cameras have you at the mercy of whatever firmware they cut from the master branch the week they shipped it. People don't buy UI because they win on specs-per-dollar. They buy it because they win on results-per-dollar.
With face detection? License plates? Tamper protection?
I'm guessing you're thinking Reolink or other Chinese ultra-commodity cam. It's fine, it's just in a different product class and ecosystem - and that's where enterprises fit in, they want that support+ecosystem and not DIYing.
Reolink CX820 8MP $129 https://reolink.com/product/cx820/
Unifi G6 8MP ~$300 https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/physical-security/uvc-g6-dome...
Avigilon H6A 8MP ~$1200 https://www.avigilon.com/security-cameras/h6a-dome
> With face detection? License plates? Tamper protection?
I do that with my Unifi Protect doorbell. RTSP streams. Google Coral. Frigate. Scales very well. Do ML on low quality stream. Look/save the high quality stream. You do it all centralized, and you can put the camera(s) on a seperate VLAN. They don't even need internet access. If you run them over PoE twisted pair, the attacker would need physical access to perform MITM. Wireless, one should assume the camera is insecure (e.g. KRACK).
Wow, that's cool, learned something new today. Does that work better in your estimation than the UI Protect software?
The purpose of my comment had only been pointing out those features don't come onboard a $100 cam.
I never really thought of Ubiquity as enterprise always felt more of the premium small to mid sized business but I am sure some enterprises use them.
The new enterprise NVRs work pretty well.
I think they're definitely not Avigilon, Genetec, Verkada, but we run a few hundred UI cams in some edge areas. It works, esp if you don't demand orchestration.
They're not all $500, some are $150-300. Overall price comparable to Honeywell, but more than, say, Lorex.
All the basic G6 cameras are in the $200 range and have edge compute?
What's the comparison at $50-100?
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Can I use it without running some inane management VM?
The UDM runs mine, but prior to that I ran a Docker container with it. It worked well.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/unifi-controller
Genuine question, if you're running unifi, why don't you want the management vm? Synology makes a decent NAS without the controller.
Synology hardware stopped being decent a while ago.
Plus their drive type restrictions which are poison in a cost-sensitive NAS.
(Seemingly rolled back recently, but a roll back can be easily rolled back itself. I don't trust them enough to count on that not happening.)
I like the hardware, cannot stand needing to run another machine just for management.
If you get one of the Cloud devices, you won't need to, as they bring their own.