I spent two days in my attic for this...

[nicklmg]

 

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[Kanna]

Yes now to buying the stuff

[ZoeSoft]

Seems like the best of both worlds. Having it online and within an app, but the service is free and not shared to companies because it's hosted in your own house.

Although wouldn't it fill any hard drive super fast, considering it's recording at 4K?

[Z.S]

Can I remotely access the camera's using the App anywhere in the world. I want to know if I can watch my house when I am not home and if so the I will definitely get these cameras as I have only heard good things about the brand from a number of youtubers

[Razor512]

The quality from those cameras are really good, though I wonder, why did the frame rate look so low?

 

PS, If in a crowded area, ensure that there is some overlap on the views from each camera to that paths and actions that take place across multiple locations can be accurately replicated.

 

For business locations, overlap is always needed, and having a camera at a lower level to more accurately capture faces of people entering. For small business shops that I did camera setups for, I would use a longer focal length lens (around 12mm) and positioned towards the entrance. That allows for detailed frame grabs of someones face unless they take very deliberate steps to avoid having their captured on video. This overall makes those individual actions look more suspicious thus allowing you to direct more attention.

 

This is pretty much needed to prevent video evidence from being used against you in cases where a criminal denies that it is them on the video and attempt to misdirect in order to discredit evidence in cases where the criminal is able to successfully leave the scene of their crime.

 

PS if you have the space, record footage continuously 24/7 and then have motion highlights on a time line since motion activation is never perfectly accurate.

[TetraSky]

4k recording? I hope it only record if an when there's an event. Because that, will fill up the hard drive, FAST.
That said, is it even worth it, to record in 4k over 1080p for home security ? Can it do 1440p ?

[Razor512]

Depending on the codec, 4K can use quite a small amount of data if there is virtually no movement. Depending on the NVR you can often get recording of around 1-1.5Mbps when there is barely any motion in the scene, and then you can have things jump up to around 20Mbps during motion. it all depends on how it implements the VBR.

 

In either case, it is best to have enough storage for a few weeks of 24/7 recording from all cameras. Even with high end systems, motion detection is never perfect and motion based recording where it records until motion stop can have many false negatives where the recording stops at an inopportune time.

 

On the other hand nearly all modern NVR software will do motion highlights on a 24/7 recording timeline, and when you need to save a clip of something, you specify the time frame that you want to export, or they will have instantly available 30 minute or 1 hour chunks, as they do no do 1 continuous file that is 24 hours long. This is the safest solution as when motion detection works perfectly then you have perfectly highlighted clips that you can export, but when there are false positives or false negatives, you do not experience any of the negative outcomes from them. If it detects motion too late, then just go further back in the timeline to see the true start of the activity. If it stops detecting motion before the true end of the activity, then you just watch further into the timeline, there is no downside.

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, TetraSky said:

4k recording? I hope it only record if an when there's an event. Because that, will fill up the hard drive, FAST.
That said, is it even worth it, to record in 4k over 1080p for home security ? Can it do 1440p ?

I would say it would probably depend on the camera sensor and lighting. With small sensors in low light conditions, you’ll be limited by image noise far sooner than resolution, so cutting the resolution would begin making some sense. Encoding image noise is expensive from a bit rate standpoint, so the savings can be considerable. 
 

On the other hand, with a good quality sensor and lens in good lighting, you can pretty much crop all day and still get usable info. “Zoom and enhance ”, except not really enhance if the detail is already there. 
 

This thing has a 1/1.8” sensor, so it should perform decently. Unfortunately, it encodes to MPEG-4, and transcoding to h.265 would probably be ill-advised for anything used as legal evidence, so 4K will still take a fair chunk of space. If the sensor and lens are up to snuff though, I’d consider it worth the cost of 4K. 

[pApA^LeGBa]

It´s legal in canada to point this at the street? Interesting. Can´t do that here. Only filming your property is allowed.

[Warin]

I love all the shade Yvonne (lovingly) throws at Linus. 

 

1 hour ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

It´s legal in canada to point this at the street? Interesting. Can´t do that here. Only filming your property is allowed.

As far as  I can tell, in the area Linus resides, it comes down to the intention of the video recordings.  If he fell under the provincial PIPA act, by commercially using said recordings, then no, he couldn't record the street in front of his house.  A municipality in Ontario, Hamilton, does not allow the recording of anything outside of your property line, but I couldn't find anything within the GVRD covering this sort of thing.  The only guidance I find is to avoid positioning cameras in such a way as to infringe on the privacy of your neighbours.  And from the views Linus gave us, it looks like he is sticking to that principle.

[mikeybabes]

5 hours ago, ZoeSoft said:

Seems like the best of both worlds. Having it online and within an app, but the service is free and not shared to companies because it's hosted in your own house.

Although wouldn't it fill any hard drive super fast, considering it's recording at 4K?

The resolution is irrelivant, it's the recording data bitrate which effects the storage capacity, as also the i-frame and b-frame and frame-rate settings.

Also most CCTV system have a quality settings, which effects also the compression, persume the devices are in H.265

 Also Linus mentioned" motion detection", using that even with a pre/post recording saves a massive amount of space.

Fair to say as long as he masks the trees on the software, the amount of recorded data during a 24hour period is very minimal, in a surburbon area.

 

 

[skywake]

 @ZoeSoft
Also Unifi Protect does have adaptive bitrate so the bitrate will change dramatically depending on the scene. Based on some forum posts I can find on it, we're probably talking about ~16Mbps max from the G4 Pro. This would be if you have the camera pointed a very noisy scene, for example having a tree in the wind filling the entire frame. Would be kinda interested if someone on the forums had some of these and could actually post what a typical bitrate is for a "max settings" on a G4 Pro was. Maybe a rare appearance from @LinusTech himself to shed some light? 

 

But even for the sake of argument lets assume what I think is probably the worst case, all 9 cameras doing 16Mbps 24/7. 144Mbps. That's ~16hours per TB. Which is a lot and kinda insane.... but not quite as insane as it might have been 10 years ago. And for this guy?

I'm not sure storage is a huge concern....

I'm also pretty sure storage is not an issue for anyone spending (excuse Australian dollerydoos) ~$7500AU on cameras.

For more sane people however who don't accidentally order pyramids of HDDs? You can set the cameras to 15fps, you can drop the max bitrate to a more sensible <10Mbps, you can set recording to only record when there's motion in a zone as @mikeybabes suggested. Also probably for a house 9 cameras is pretty insane, I think for most people 3-4 cameras would give you pretty decent coverage for things you want to record (eg front/back entrances, carport, road)

[Negative_Nancy]

6 hours ago, skywake said:

 I'm not sure storage is a huge concern....

I'm also pretty sure storage is not an issue for anyone spending (excuse Australian dollerydoos) ~$7500AU on cameras.

Doesn't the Protect have a limited HDD space. I believe it supports only one drive of 5TB max. So that would mean you could only store 80 hours of footage.

Or did they add the ability to store to a NAS or something similar? 

 

I'm still stuck with the Unifi Video application, since that can store the data on an NAS, and thus allows me to make an off-site backup of it.

[greenhorn]

Maybe I'm too paranoid, but I would put the visible parts of the outdoor ethernet cable in some metal tubing to make it more difficult for a thief to just cut them. Also, when mounting the camera on a brick wall, I would drill into the brick so that it is more difficult to tear the camera off the wall. Which brings me to the next question, how sturdy are those cameras? Could they easily be smashed using a shovel for example or could they be just turned away from the area of interest using a stick or similar device?

[Zberg]

Absolutely loved the yvonne face in attic.  I was waiting for her to say exactly what my wife would say "this is exactly how I planned to be spending my night" LOL.  Perfect.

 

Nice job guys, good teamwork, looks great.

[Zberg]

When I was setting up home cameras I debated on going the route of getting cameras where I dont pay a fee and make a box to store lots of footage on and either manually go through and delete old footage or have it set up to dump footage after a certain time period.  

 

But I dont want another box (for that purpose anyways  ), or the hassle of dealing with all the data myself.  For 1-3 cameras, nest isnt bad (I would imagine for how many he is putting up, it would cost a lot though).  I like them dealing with all the data, and having X numbers of days to save the footage or let it delete without messing around with it.  I thought to myself at the time of setting this up that some of the youtubers with all the gear they have sitting around (16tb HDD's) would probably just make a server and handle it themselves, but for the cost and effort, Im ok with the 10 bucks a month (nest fee for 3 cameras), worth it for the convenience for myself.

 

I cant imagine how fast the amount of 4k cameras he put up would fill up your storage space.  It looked like he had like 10 cameras in that pile.

 

 

[Zberg]

2 hours ago, greenhorn said:

Maybe I'm too paranoid, but I would put the visible parts of the outdoor ethernet cable in some metal tubing to make it more difficult for a thief to just cut them. Also, when mounting the camera on a brick wall, I would drill into the brick so that it is more difficult to tear the camera off the wall. Which brings me to the next question, how sturdy are those cameras? Could they easily be smashed using a shovel for example or could they be just turned away from the area of interest using a stick or similar device?

Probably too paranoid.  If they are getting that close that they can cut the wire, they could just as easily spray paint over the lens or smash the camera.  

[Velcade]

20 hours ago, ZoeSoft said:

Seems like the best of both worlds. Having it online and within an app, but the service is free and not shared to companies because it's hosted in your own house.

Although wouldn't it fill any hard drive super fast, considering it's recording at 4K?

Continuous recording at 4k for 5 cameras storing 14 days of footage is roughly 9.5TB.  It's not too bad and if you're worried about storage just have it save events only.

[Velcade]

4 hours ago, Zberg said:

When I was setting up home cameras I debated on going the route of getting cameras where I dont pay a fee and make a box to store lots of footage on and either manually go through and delete old footage or have it set up to dump footage after a certain time period.  

 

But I dont want another box (for that purpose anyways  ), or the hassle of dealing with all the data myself.  For 1-3 cameras, nest isnt bad (I would imagine for how many he is putting up, it would cost a lot though).  I like them dealing with all the data, and having X numbers of days to save the footage or let it delete without messing around with it.  I thought to myself at the time of setting this up that some of the youtubers with all the gear they have sitting around (16tb HDD's) would probably just make a server and handle it themselves, but for the cost and effort, Im ok with the 10 bucks a month (nest fee for 3 cameras), worth it for the convenience for myself.

 

I cant imagine how fast the amount of 4k cameras he put up would fill up your storage space.  It looked like he had like 10 cameras in that pile.

 

 

A big factor, for me anyway, was longevity.  Tomorrow Google could decide Nest is no longer profitable and you'd be left with outdoor paper weights.  Owning your footage locally and not having to worry about a company shutting down their cloud servers is great.

[Razor512]

4 hours ago, Zberg said:

When I was setting up home cameras I debated on going the route of getting cameras where I dont pay a fee and make a box to store lots of footage on and either manually go through and delete old footage or have it set up to dump footage after a certain time period.  

 

But I dont want another box (for that purpose anyways  ), or the hassle of dealing with all the data myself.  For 1-3 cameras, nest isnt bad (I would imagine for how many he is putting up, it would cost a lot though).  I like them dealing with all the data, and having X numbers of days to save the footage or let it delete without messing around with it.  I thought to myself at the time of setting this up that some of the youtubers with all the gear they have sitting around (16tb HDD's) would probably just make a server and handle it themselves, but for the cost and effort, Im ok with the 10 bucks a month (nest fee for 3 cameras), worth it for the convenience for myself.

 

I cant imagine how fast the amount of 4k cameras he put up would fill up your storage space.  It looked like he had like 10 cameras in that pile.

 

 

The issue with going with a cloud reliant solution, is that you introduce many more points of failure while having lower overall quality, and a higher total cost of ownership.

 

For example, with variable bit rates, the storage use is quite low

 

For example, try the axis design tool. http://www.axis.com/en/products/video/design_tool/v2/

 

Add a sample camera, (the Axis p3220-LV is commonly used in new construction for government buildings, as well as schools. (4K camera)

 

Add a camera, then double click on the entry and set the profile to custom, then specify 4K 30FPS recording (under Continuous recording).

 

Depending on your NVR setup, it can often be as simple as building a cheap core i3 or other entry level system, and stuffing 2 8TB hard drives in there, and enjoy a month or more of 4K 30 FPS recording from 6 or so cameras.

[Zberg]

16 minutes ago, Velcade said:

A big factor, for me anyway, was longevity.  Tomorrow Google could decide Nest is no longer profitable and you'd be left with outdoor paper weights.  Owning your footage locally and not having to worry about a company shutting down their cloud servers is great.

very fair point!

[Intergalacticbits]

When I watched this video I was so impressed by the quality of the picture on these cameras.

The night time shot was really impressive.

 

7 hours ago, greenhorn said:

Maybe I'm too paranoid, but I would put the visible parts of the outdoor ethernet cable in some metal tubing to make it more difficult for a thief to just cut them. Also, when mounting the camera on a brick wall, I would drill into the brick so that it is more difficult to tear the camera off the wall. Which brings me to the next question, how sturdy are those cameras? Could they easily be smashed using a shovel for example or could they be just turned away from the area of interest using a stick or similar device?

Not paranoid at all.

Sounds like just thinking things through to me. A lot of people probably put their cameras up high for that reason and likely try to hide them.

So as not to be so obvious to the few people your putting them up for in the first place.

Those few who are the most aggressive people you don't ever want your family to meet if they don't have too.

 

I wish this super quality equipment was cheap enough for everyone to easily get.

We'd all be better off for it.

Just the way I feel about it.

 

Nice gear. 

 

[Razor512]

To delve more into total cost of ownership, most cloud services become far more expensive than building an NVR. With cloud reliant cameras the subscription fees, especially if you want 24/7 recording, can quickly become very expensive. Furthermore since these are utilitarian items, they are used for years. Think about it, if you are installing security cameras, how long do you think you will need the surveillance (this means after the time period, you will remove the cameras and never need to monitor your home again)? if it is more than 2 years then the cloud solution will end up costing more than an NVR solution.

 

Not only that, but you will have more points of failure as anything that goes wrong with your WAN connection, or anything that goes wrong with the server that the company is running, will cause a loss of the core functionality for you.

 

Furthermore the cloud solutions are always lower quality, for example look at any of the consumer cloud cameras that advertise 4K, they all keep their peak bit rate to less than 2Mbps per camera, thus they never seem to have any fine detail. Because they target a large market where most people will be stuck with hellishly bad ISPs, e.g., comcast, they need to cater people who have 5-10 Mbps upload speeds and may want multiple cameras. Furthermore, they are not interested in the infrastructure needed to have a cloud service that will pull in a 5-10Mbps stream per camera, as that will cut into their profit.

 

Finally you are stick with the issue of cloud reliance and the compromising position it puts you in as a customer.

 

For example, suppose you buy the $400 nest 4K camera camera and you are somehow fine with spending $12 per month for service for it, then 6 months later, Nest execs decide that it is really not fashionable to only have 2 yachts (you wouldn't wear the same 2 shirts for the week, why should you have to use the same yacht each day?), then they decide that your service fee is now going to be $29.95 per month. What do you do? You can't access the camera locally.

 

What happens if the company that makes your IOT hardware, pulls a wink: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/6/21249950/smart-home-platform-wink-monthly-subscription

 

Or pulls a revolv: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3051760/why-nests-revolv-hubs-wont-be-the-last-iot-devices-knocked-offline.html

Or a nextbit: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16867380/nextbit-smart-storage-cloud-service-shut-down-robin-phone

Or an Eyefi: https://petapixel.com/2016/06/30/eye-fi-brick-older-wi-fi-cards-photographer-arent-happy/

(few random companies, though there are tons who screwed customers)

 

Overall, by having a local access option and your own NVR, you have more piece of mind in the security of your investment. You have a lower total cost of ownership, after the initial upfront cost, you have no other ongoing fees on hardware that you can use for many years. There is no risk of a company holding your hardware ransom in order to make you engage in the sunk cost fallacy and dump more money into subscriptions.

 

There is no risk of your hardware becoming an expensive paperweight because the company that made it decided that the device is "end of life", which is another term for "sales for this device have leveled off, and thus it is no longer profitable to continue pouring money into the cloud services for it".

 

You will have better overall quality in the case of cameras since there is not as much pressure to compromise on video quality in favor of lower upload bandwidth use.

 

When your hardware relies on a single company for service, then they have a monopoly, and will behave as such. This is especially the case as people are more likely to give in to a bad subscription deal if the alternative is having their expensive hardware become almost completely useless.

 

[Keflex]

10 hours ago, Negative_Nancy said:

Doesn't the Protect have a limited HDD space. I believe it supports only one drive of 5TB max. So that would mean you could only store 80 hours of footage.

Or did they add the ability to store to a NAS or something similar? 

 

I'm still stuck with the Unifi Video application, since that can store the data on an NAS, and thus allows me to make an off-site backup of it.

There is a Protect NVR in the Early Access store that supports 4x 8TB drives in Raid 1 or 5.   Though I think it's just a matter of time before Protect will be allowed to run your own hardware.  You can always put Unifi cameras in standalone mode to output RTSP to whatever NVR/NAS combo u have.

[Velcade]

11 hours ago, Negative_Nancy said:

Doesn't the Protect have a limited HDD space. I believe it supports only one drive of 5TB max. So that would mean you could only store 80 hours of footage.

Or did they add the ability to store to a NAS or something similar? 

 

I'm still stuck with the Unifi Video application, since that can store the data on an NAS, and thus allows me to make an off-site backup of it.

You can use up to a 16TB harddrive.  I am running a 10TB with no issues.