I hope you’re doing well. Someone left us in the middle of a CCTV installation project. The company had installed Hikvision cameras but went out of business, and now I have to set up the entire network and also add an NVR for these cameras. In total, we have around 16 cameras, and I still need to purchase one PTZ camera.
I was wondering if I can buy a UniFi NVR and use it with all of these Hikvision cameras.
I’m volunteering for a nonprofit, so I was thinking of purchasing a UniFi NVR and one UniFi ViewPort to display all the camera feeds on a TV.
The plan is to have all the cameras, NVR, and ViewPort connected to a single 24-port POE UniFi switch, which will then be connected to the Dream Machine Special Edition, serving as our firewall.
We also have some other devices that will be on a separate switch and VLAN, but the reason I want to keep this setup separate is to ensure that if the firewall fails, the recording will still continue uninterrupted.
My main question is: has anyone here used a third-party camera with UniFi NVR before?
As I mentioned, this is for a nonprofit, so they won’t be able to invest in an AI-powered port for all the cameras. Can I directly record the feeds from these cameras to the NVR? How reliable will this be? Or should I just stick to a Hikvision NVR instead?
I think the unify systems are proprietary in that regard, I have never seen a UI system that would take RTSP from other cameras. However UI cameras can be put in stand alone mode and do RTSP to another NVR. I have done that. The UI system includes a lot of metadata in the recordings as big binary blobs, I am not sure it would understand not having it from other cameras.
If you are on a tight budget, you can look at zoneminder. Its pretty robust, all you need is a good decent performing workstation with a good bit of RAM and and decent speed drives.
It uses motion in the background and works pretty well for what it is, https://zoneminder.com/
It will eat 16 cameras like cake on any modern desktop. Really that’s all an NVR is, and zoneminder is actually the NVR software on a lot of NVR lines just re-branded.
Specifically for the HikVisions, I had quite a hard time getting some to talk with both my UniFi UDM Pro and a TP-Link Vigi NVR.
Setting up some cameras for my parents place, I was going to hook in some old HikVisions but had no luck at all - even getting hold of the HikVision software. This is in no way saying don’t try it - The cameras I got were second hand ones that had already been used with a HikVision NVR.
However, I got hold of some TP-Link cameras and hooked a PTZ one up to the Unifi system, and it worked well. Was able to control it and move it around. Good image too.
If you go down the Unifi line, then when you buy a PTZ grab hold of a Unifi one then.
I have a video on the third party camera support with their new AI Port. The TL;DW is that it’s not a great setup if you are using all third party cameras. If you are going to replace the Hikvision cameras with UniFi then using UniFI makes sense.
Update on my current setup: I’ve ordered a UNVR and 30 third-party cameras. I’m now able to add all 30 cameras, which are from brands other than UniFi. I’ll provide an update once everything is set up.
The brands that are working for me so far are: Dahua, CP Plus, and Secureus. All the cameras are 2K, and their built-in features, like night vision and automatic day-to-night switching, are functioning well. I haven’t noticed any frame drops or issues while recording footage.
The only change I made on all the cameras was creating a new ONVIF user and disabling the RTSP stream over TLS in the camera settings.
I’ll keep you posted once I’ve configured all 30 cameras on the UNVR.
Have you tried the archiving feature in UniFi Protect? If so, which cloud provider do you use—Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox? I don’t want to archive footage from all my cameras, just a few critical areas for about 4-5 days. I’ll probably need around 4-5TB of space. Which one would you recommend for a cost-effective solution?
I had some issues on the very first versions of protect that announced 3rd party camera support with Dahua based cameras , to be honnest havent tried any other vendors.
i had some video footage dropage , but it was a on a individual camera, older model that was already tempemental even on a dahua nvr.
i could only adopt them while on the native “default” VLAN.
maybe get a UNAS Pro and sync the archive footage there. i can’t think of a more cost effective option than that , it also a supported solution.
The UI system includes a lot of metadata in the recordings as big binary blobs, I am not sure it would understand not having it from other cameras.