UniFi Protect: Breaking Down 3rd Party Camera Support

Synology Surveillance Station With Amcrest AI Advanced Detection

Connect With Us
---------------------------------------------------

Lawrence Systems Shirts and Swag
---------------------------------------------------

AFFILIATES & REFERRAL LINKS
---------------------------------------------------
Amazon Affiliate Store

UniFi Affiliate Link

All Of Our Affiliates help us out and can get you discounts!

Gear we use on Kit

Use OfferCode LTSERVICES to get 10% off your order at

Digital Ocean Offer Code

HostiFi UniFi Cloud Hosting Service

Protect your privacy with a VPN from Private Internet Access

Patreon

Chapters
00:00 UniFi Third Party Camera Support
01:44 The UniFi AI Port
02:47 Adopting ONVIF Third Party Cameras
04:29 ONVIF Third Party Cameras and UniFi AI Port

[WKFoster]

The sucky part about unifi and third party cameras is no motion detection. Totally killed it for me

[Suicidal]

@7:01 Lol "Synology and their third party", I think you meant UniFi but we do all know what you meant. Good video.

[ILruffian]

Thanks for taking the time to make this video. My setup with with UDM Pro, 4 AI Ports and a mix of Dahua and Hik cameras is working great. The Unifi interface is so nice compared to the PRC based stuff. My UNVR just arrived. Will put the drives in it over the next week or so.

[mjohnson]

You always seem to have just the video I was looking for. I also have a full Amcrest/Surveillance Station setup and have just started using Protect. It's like you created this video just for me. LOL

[rajilsaraswat]

Frigate as a standalone NVR is working great here.

[juvinious]

Man, I have a reolink doorbell camera. I had a unifi-cam docker application providing it to my unvr as a g3. When I saw your last video, I thought I had to use the AI module. I went ahead and added third party support and it showed up. Pretty neat, but all this is in vein though since I am going to replace the doorbell with a unifi doorbell as this one has considerable lag.
Thanks for the information!

[TheMajorKC]

sadly without the motion events on onvif, not worth dealing with.

[plrpilot]

I have done a similar setup as yours -- unifi NVR and a combination of Amcrest/Reolink cameras. I also have them managed by our synology system. However, I noticed that the playback performance of the Unifi NVR with the 3rd party cameras was atrocious -- often failing to load past events. This could have been an early version of the unifi support (this was about a month ago), but I decided to hold off until the feature set was more mature. I'm hopeful for to see this mature.

[GekRaider]

It looks like Unifi captures only the RTSP stream from camera and processing it on the Unifi hardware. Synilogy can work with the two-way ONVIF protocol and capable to read stream metadata (e.g. motion, AI, etc.) from camera and edit settings on it.

[manslayerdbzgt]

The ai Port will be getting a feature where you can apply it to five unified cameras at once and I think three of a different brand and two of a different brand at once but you at least be able to do five even if I cameras at once whether they're wireless or wired but that's coming in another update

[runwire]

I’m coming from Synology to UniFi using Hikvision cameras. I have no complaints with Synology but love the idea of managing everything through a single pane of glass.

That said, are you able to get audio to work within UniFi Protect? Seems like this feature is intentionally disabled, being that ONVIF supports audio? Given audio worked, I’d abandon Synology and eventually move my cameras over to UniFi in the future when they need replacing.

[scottibyte]

The key problem with third party support is despite third party advanced adoption, if the cameras are on a different subnet, either they can't be adopted at all or the connection is unstable. I have three Unifi cameras on a vlan and they have no issues at all. I have different models of Reolink cameras and they work fine with protect on the main lan. They fail advanced adoption or don't work at all on the vlan where the protect cameras do work. Most people have their protect cameras on a dedicated vlan and 3rd party cameras are broken on a vlan

[TheGlorySaint]

Want me interests is what is possible when a Ptz camera in patrol mode an an ai port. Does it detect motion, when it moves position or not, what about events etc. A video about this topic would be great.

[MountainLife]

THANK YOU for showing how to do advanced adoption. Literally spent days scrubbing Reddit and other sites to find ways to adopt the cameras that was on another vlan. Are you able to confirm if audio was captured in your recordings? I'm using Tapo cameras and Protect isn't capturing audio from them, seems to be a common issue.

[nmfireman]

So if I understand you correct if I want to use my Reolink camera which does work, I tried it out and get it to record on motion. I have to buy the AI port otherwise it will record constantly.

[tehsimo]

Is there a list anywhere that gives the best bang for buck when you include the AI port cost?

[durtoffmyshoulda]

In my last testing, 3rd party cameras didn't support audio recording, only video. Does the AI port change that?

[Kirigaya__Yuuki]

So technically, AI port is just a device which takes an input rtsp stream, process AI stuff on it and spits out another rtsp stream for unifi nvr (or maybe just process and spits out the metadata containing AI events info).
And it can be in any location in your network (doesn't have to be directly connected to the camera).

So, this functionality could have been easily integrated into the NVR itself if they just added that AI processing chip into it. Or it could potentially be selfhosted too.

[rosskovelman]

What I don’t get is that I have a warning that I am over the limit with 13 cameras yet the website says 24, and this is for HD recording. I cannot change the recording to 4k or 2k so it seems things are still not 100% right.

[iam_anderdingus]

I have 9x Hikvision cameras 5x are 4MP and 4x are 2MP. How do you specify which stream and therefore which quality is being displayed in live view and is being recorded by Protect? Currently in my Hikvision app, the SD view is displayed in live view (which I can change to HD) and the HD view is being recorded to the NVR. Thanks