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:

  1. Ring has a very “wife-friendly” interface. How does the Unifi Protect UI fare in comparison?
  2. I’m looking at the NVR Instant to handle about 6x FHD cameras. Would a 1TB WD Purple be suitable for that?
  3. Motion detection - How is Unifi Protect with this compared to Ring? Better, worse, or equivalent? How flexible is it?
  4. (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?
  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I’m not going to be storing 24/7 footage outside of important motion detection instances, which we can just download to our phones or whatever if it’s important enough to hold onto. Everything else can be recorded over.

      When I was testing Frigate, I ran a single camera storing 24/7 footage specifically to see how long it would go for. I think it used 100GB after a week or so. Multiply that by 6, that’s, well, 600GB. But I’m also not super concerned with having crystal clear footage at all times (Ring set my expectations really low), and even 1366x768 @ 20-30 FPS is more than plenty for what we need.

      For the doorbell, I’d use a proper doorbell cam that can use the existing wires for power.

      That’s how my current Ring doorbell is connected.

      Reolink’s wifi one comes with an adapter to use it with existing wiring.

      I keep seeing Reolink pop up. Would a Reolink doorbell work with a Unifi NVR? I’d rather have a G4 wireless, but that’s very likely to not happen.