from lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 13 Feb 19:30
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63700385
Without getting into too many revealing details, my wife and I have a handful of Ring cameras that we are looking to replace, especially with the bullshit they’ve been trying to pull lately. They are used often, indoor and outdoor.
Last year, I tried rolling my own replacement with a standalone Frigate machine and the HA integration, but that ended up falling flat on it’s face. I am not looking to troubleshoot that setup - that ship has sailed. Moving on.
Enter Unifi Protect. I’m already familiar with Unifi, my network has been running fantastically on the OG trash can UDM since it came out, plus a U7 Lite AP for extra coverage in our tall-ish 3-story duplex. The place is wired with Cat5, but since we rent, some areas will have to be handled with wifi-only units - the G4 instant looks suitable for this.
Questions:
- Ring has a very “wife-friendly” interface. How does the Unifi Protect UI fare in comparison?
- I’m looking at the NVR Instant to handle about 6x FHD cameras. Would a 1TB WD Purple be suitable for that?
- Motion detection - How is Unifi Protect with this compared to Ring? Better, worse, or equivalent? How flexible is it?
- (less important) I’m reasonably certain I can set up a doorbell replacement via HA, zigbee button, and a G4 Instant. No Cat5 to the front door unfortunately, just the usual pair of wires to the wall-mounted ringer inside. POE is not an option here. Viable? Or should I do something else?
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UniFi NVR using non-UniFi cameras was a bit tough to set up, at least in a way that has ‘smart’ features. Presumably using UniFi cameras (and/or doorbell) would be much easier. But once running it’s easy to use, and there is a nice “Protect” app. Maybe check a how-to video for the app to take a look, unfortunately there is no demo site from Ubiquiti.
I’m going to be running this with Unifi cameras.
How long do you want to store footage for? With 6 cameras at 8Mbps each, you’d get less than two days of video on a 1TB drive. You could drop the bitrate quite a bit if you use H265 instead of H264, but it’s still not a huge amount of storage.
Several manufacturers have sites to determine how much storage you’d need based on number of cameras, bit rate and how long you want to store the videos for. Just use any of those to get a rough estimate. Personally I’d recommend a 10TB or larger WD Purple Pro, since it has 512MB cache instead of 256MB.
For the doorbell, I’d use a proper doorbell cam that can use the existing wires for power. Reolink’s wifi one comes with an adapter to use it with existing wiring.
The Unifi cameras don’t support ONVIF, so you’re essentially locked into their ecosystem, and it’d be difficult to use them with a different NVR if you ever want to switch. Maybe that’s OK for your use case though.
I’ve been running Protect since around Christmas on a UCG Fiber with a 2TB SSD, with a single G6 Turret recording 24/7 full 4k quality. As of right now, my recording history goes back to January 19th, or about 25 days. Based on that, rough napkin math would put 6 cameras at around 8 days of continuous FHD footage, by my estimate. Protect has per-camera settings that allow you to change retention policies, as well as choose between event-based recording, continuous, or adaptive, where it reduces recording quality for the uneventful majority of the time, then records full quality during events. These options would meaningfully increase recording storage time.
While I’m currently only running a single Unifi-branded camera, I have previously added four TPLink Tapo wifi cameras to Protect as well, though you have to enable an experimental setting to add third-party cameras.
Protect allows you to set up detections based on a wide range of events, I believe partially dependent on what camera model you use and what the camera can process internally. My G6 Turret can detect motion, people, vehicles, animals, license plates, faces, burglars, packages, glass breaking, sirens, car horns, dog barking, talking, etc. You can set motion zones to filter areas of the field of view for detections, you can set privacy blackout areas, and you can disable the microphone. Can’t compare detections to Ring, as I’ve only used Google Nest and Unifi Protect. I haven’t put a huge amount of effort into managing detections beyond setting a zone so I didn’t get notification spam… of which you can set push notifications and/or email notifications per detection type. It’s relatively easy and responsive to click through detection events in the app. Don’t know how much slower it would be on HDD storage.
As for the doorbell, I’ve been looking to switch from Nest to Unifi, but I’m waiting for the G6 Pro Entry. Since you can’t run Ethernet, have you considered the G4 wifi doorbell? It runs off of 24V AC that’s typically already running to the doorbell. If not, I’m sure you could kludge something together in Home Assistant.
As for the interface and wife-friendliness, the setup side of things can get you a bit lost, but the day-to-day usage is pretty intuitive. It’s easy to pick a camera and go into the detection history or scroll through the timeline.
No idea how it compares to Ring, but my wife is a severe technophobe and she had no issues or complaints with Protect. We only have one doorbell + one camera connected to a CloudKey+ though, so your mileage may vary.
Motion detection works reasonably well as far as I can tell, with person, vehicle and animal detection too.
Regarding the doorbell, one option you have is to try finding a second-hand Unifi G4 Doorbell (non-pro). It can be wired with only the two wires you already have. Just make sure you have relatively good 5GHz WiFi reception near your front door, because the 2.4GHz antennas on this model are notably bad.
Outside ring a unifi ecosystem is going to be your next best bet. I have four cameras (poe) and the G4 doorbell (wireless). I run protect with a sata SSD drive on the cloudkey gen2+. Everything just pretty much works. I have not tried to use other brand cameras though. The experience is pretty consistent with other unifi gear. From my wifes perspective she has never complained and weve had it for 2 years now. It easy to navigate and always works.
Only thing id note though is you probably want some kind of SSD for the camera storage. A harddrive is probably better long term but without an SSD the video takes longer to load and scrubbing video can get painful. ie your wife will get annoyed. Itll work with an hdd but its just noticeably less snappy.
I’ve been watching the wifi G4 doorbell like a hawk, it’s just perpetually sold out 😂 eBay listings aren’t any better, being even more expensive…
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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Reolink might be another to consider.