IP camera talk now that Ubiquiti is supporting 3rd party cams... Ubiquiti vs Frigate

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
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Not sure where to put this since it’s hardware and software combo.

Thoughts on Frigate vs Unifi for IP cams? now that Unifi is allowing 3rd party cams?

I’ve been thinking of selling some stuff to purchase an IP cam system for home. Just a few cams w/ local storage b/c I’m tired of cloud cam providers raising costs year over year Ring … or just cancelling “lifetime free recording” Arlo .

I already have a 42u w/ servers for proxmox and Truenas… no point listing them all here. I also have Unifi already for networking. My plan was to install Frigate recording software in a proxmox container, and purchase a small GPU and Google Coral device (as recommended by Frigate), along w/ some 3rd party IP cams.

But then I got this in an email…

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So… Pros and Cons… Frigate vs Unifi

FRIGATE
Pros

  • Open source, less likely to be “locked down” / have features taken away later
  • Already natively supports 3rd party cams, it’s literally the whole point of the software
  • Can use a Google Coral NPU to detect people, etc.
  • As a proxmox container, container would easily integrate into my backups onto main and backup Truenas

Cons

  • Needs lots of tuning per camera from what I understand

UNIFI
Pros

  • 7 bay Unifi NVR @ $500 comes with a “free” $450 Unifi G4 Pro camera w/ AI and 3x optical zoom
  • I’m guessing it works with the “single pane of glass” with their networking software that I already use
  • They are now allowing 3rd pary cams (probably a response to competitors like Synology is my guess)
  • AI detection should be pre-tuned
  • phone notifications

Cons

  • No idea if AI stuff works w/ 3rd party cams
  • Can always take away 3rd party cam access b/c it’s closed source as far as I know
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Third party cameras in Unifi have no detections. Unifi does all motion and AI detections on the cameras not the NVR. This feature is for organizations that want to migrate to Unifi but can’t replace all cameras immediately.

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Does the Unifi integrate into Home Assistant? Frigate can and probably what I’m going to move to later down the road. I just have a cheap DVR right now and I think the cameras may also do the motion/person detect but I’m not certain yet.

It may come down to simple, I bet the Unifi is simple to get going.

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ah, ok. that kills unifi. thank you!

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There is a Unifi Protect integration for Home Assistant but it is unofficial, and with Protect 5 coming out recently (the same version that allows third party cameras) there was some pretty big breaking changes. The community had a pretty big outcry and Ubiquiti publicly promised to work with Home Assistant going forward - what that means remains to be seen.

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First things first - I am not a Blueiris nut like you may see on certain forums. I have tested several linux based camera programs and always ended back with BI. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I took the simple route. I was running on a ridiculously overpowered PC for years and finally decided to dump all the BI and camera motion sensing and change to 7x24 recording, no motion sensing, and stop banging my head on the wall and eating up my nights tinkering with every little shadow and motion setting.

I also dumped all my Ubuntu QEMU/Libvirt VMs and built a Proxmox cluster (2 desktop computers with just failover/migration - no HA). Then I burned a Proxmox VM with Win11 Pro and reinstalled BI. Works great. BTW, you absolutely can LEGALLY download and use Win10 or Win11 Pro and run it without paying for it. Just don’t register it. You will find proof of this if you google for it. This is stated by MS. You can’t do any “customization”, which is mostly a desktop thing, but who cares if you’re running it headless and its the only app?

Amazing when you finally do see that BI, at least in my configuration, hardly pulls any cycles. Of the 2 PM nodes the BI VM is running on the larger one with an Intel 14700k CPU, 64G ram and ALL Network storage. BI has 4 vcpus (consuming around 15%) and 12G of memory (consuming about 30%).

Of course those numbers fluctuate when I search for clips or convert and download but otherwise its very steady. I have 2 other Ubuntu VMs on the same PM node with room for more. To be clear, I don’t need motion detection. I have a small house, big fence, 2 big dogs and a sh-tload of guns. I have a mix of 18 indoor and outdoor Hikvision and Amcrest, one Uniview and one Reolink (doorbell) cameras all running at full FPS 7x24 recording direct-to-disk recording.
I have 2 x 6TB virtual disks on the BI Window that should give me about rolling 15-20 days of 7x24 recordings.

All the PM nodes are connected to a 10G network using NFS from a NAS built on an 1U rack mount Dell server (DL380 G9). The only camera that does any motion events is the Reolink doorbell and from what I subsequently read, that’s about all Reolink is good for, but it does it well.

I have it all behind pfsense so I VPN in to watch cameras, and block them all from phoning home to China (it’s really ridiculous). To make a long story short, for the cost BI works with every camera I ever threw at it and this configuration is the best I’ve ever had. Plus Proxmox kicks QEMU’s butt in its ease of use!

Just my 2 cents (ok, maybe 4 cents).

Edit: BI does NOT need a GPU. I have been running this VM without GPU passthru for 3 months now without a hitch.

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I would disagree with running Windows “legally” without buying a product key. If that were the case, they would not build the evaluation versions.

I also think Microsoft would disagree about the license if they came to your door. The sad fact is that it costs too much money to track down every user with no registration and prosecute them, the judgement would likely be 2 or 3 times the price of the most expensive license, and that wouldn’t even cover the court costs. But just note, they can at any time shut your system off, which wouldn’t cost them much at all in the grand scheme. Something as simple as look at the uptime or install date, check if registered, nuke more than 30 days unregistered.

Windows 7 used to reboot if you went past that 30 day window, it would reboot every hour or two hours (been a log time since I had a situation like that).

End of lecture, we should not be promoting the use of unlicensed “stuff” here. If you do it, just don’t say your are doing it. You could have simply said you were running it in a win11 VM on Proxmox.

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It does depend to some extent on how you want to use your cameras: if you just want to record, 24/7 then the options are pretty endless.
If you want to use the system as an alarm system, locally hosted, then Unifi is excellent, and I’d go that route.

I use mine as an alarm. I have ‘lines’ set up in each camera, with alerts when the lines are crossed; smart detection zones and so on. The cameras record 24/7, but I get an alert on my phone when a person or vehicle triggers the line crossing or zone alerts. This is where unifi is really good. The AI detection has got better and better with every update, so I now receive very few false alarms. I know the moment someone comes onto my property.

I had a brief play with a cheapish Chinese IP PTZ and synology surveillance station, and switched all the alerts off after a week - it was chalk and cheese compared to the Unifis. Darn thing went off at the slightest movement. Even my car cover flapping in the breeze set of a ‘person’ alert :confused:

Unifi is pricey (for a home user), but it’s super simple to set up, it does what it says on the box, and it improves constantly.

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FWIW I have been running Win11 Pro since the original post and have NOT registered it. I googled the crap out of this and found several posts on legit MS sites with responses from MS employees that said quite clearly that MS has no problems with you running Windows without activating it. The obvious caveat is no support, but what “tech savvy” home user has ever called MS for support anyways? Ok, I called ONCE and that was to try and reuse a license on the same desktop after adding memory and a NIC. The other caveat is that you cannot “customize” your installation. I have since migrated that Windows QEMU/qcow image to Proxmox without a passthru video card and have never been happier or more stable. No customizations, no cares. It runs great. I login once a month to check for updates to Windows or BI so I do not care about customization so I do not ever plan on activating.