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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

I like the Ubiquiti cameras because unifi handles the webrtc handshake so you can run your cameras local and see them from anywhere while keeping data on-prem.

It's a little annoying Protect doesn't have a software install but the legacy unifi video still work fine. I put in ~5 cameras over the last few weeks and been really happy with them.

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FWIW: I just upgraded to UniFi Protect (with the CloudKey Gen2). Although it's annoying I don't get to run the software on my own server anymore, I've found the Protect app for iOS is much more polished and is much more responsive than the older UniFi Video app.

Good to hear. I led the UniFi Protect effort at Ubiquiti. Responsiveness and fast time-to-video were our top UX priorities for the system. The WebRTC direct-connect and bypassing cloud servers were big factors in delivering that responsiveness. The added security and lack of monthly fees was another major bonus.

While I have you here, please consider the option to install the software on-prem.

I was this || close to not going unifi because it wasn't clear what the longtime support for unifi video was. I'm still not super-happy with that aspect as it's not clear if the hardware is tied to protect or not.

AFAIK the cameras still output standard RTSP video, so you could still use those streams in other software.

The problem I have with protect is I already have a full blown Proxmox setup with mirrored ZFS drives that I can easily expand.

I lose that if I switch to their custom hardware. I've also heard it doesn't scale well to multiple users or larger numbers of cameras.

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