UniFi-Video Products End of Life Announcement | Hacker News Reader

UniFi-Video Products End of Life Announcement

community.ui.com

107 pointswatersb85 comments

What's going on here is Ubiquiti want to sell you a hardware+software combination (Unifi-Protect) rather than provide a free software NVR (Unifi-Video) which could run via a container on 3rd party hardware/cloud/etc.

This is part of a trend towards a higher TCO for their products. However as a long-time owner of Ubiquiti network and security camera equipment I have to say I welcome the move as it has resulted in higher quality products. On the security camera front, Unifi-Protect still represents the best one-time Cap-Ex rather option rather than Op-Ex options such as Ring and Google Nest who charge monthly for camera cloud storage, etc.

I recently started getting into home automation and was appalled to learn that Nest no longer provides an API to access my own devices. What’s the point of a “smart” system if you’re completely limited to what functionality a single vendor wants to allow?

I got rid of my Nest and got an Ecobee. Their APIs are confusing IMO and missing some basic functionality but it’s workable for my needs.

Nest is transitioning to a different API, not getting rid of it completely. Individuals can sign up for access here: https://developers.google.com/nest/device-access

According to that page the API for individuals won’t exist until late 2020.

Nest (Google) gotten rid of their API and are promissing to have a new API real soon now. It may not have the full features of the old API, the messaging hasn't been consistent, but they had suggested that APIs could be read only, which is limiting.

Meanwhile, they've added agressive captchas to the website, and are switching our their undocumented json api for an undocumented protobuf api.

Unfortunately, they seem to be the only smart thermostat that supports separate aux heat and emergency heat wires. I don't know for sure if my HVAC system actually treats those differently, but it's wired for it, and the previous system had it, so I'd want to retain that. (But please correct me if there's a better choice... I'm tired of not being able to use the hardware I bought to do what I want it to do; single stage heat pump, with 7 wires: common (c), power (r), heat pump (o), fan (g), heat/cool (y), aux heat (w2), and emergency heat (*). Bonus points if the replacement has a big mounting bracket, cause the nest one just barely covers missed paint ;)

In my installations, which I swapped from Nest to Ecobee, the Ecobee 3 supports aux heat:

https://support.ecobee.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010176991-ec...

https://support.ecobee.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000414828-Ho...

Note that with basic Ecobee systems, you may have to purchase another adapter to connect to some systems. The Ecobee 3 (not Lite) I didn’t have to.

https://support.ecobee.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028428931-Wh...

I have a property with industrial boiler, heat exchanger, and a dozen independent zones w/ pumps, heat only, with particular needs to cycle pumps from time to time, keep active for minimum windows, etc.

I also have a property with geothermal plus auxiliary electric.

Of things I can manage from Siri, Google, and Alexa, both (only?) Nest and ecobee 3 were able to support these custom/advanced configurations, though I’d argue Nest was better with the commercial/heavy needs, both in the installer options available, and in service support.

I haven’t found others that support these options that are also supported by HomeKit (Homebridge) or Home Assistant.

Yeah. Higher quality is nice. But being sold on open source software availability and then “losing” it in this way feels like a ripoff. This is really not a good move.

UI is not a company to ever expect stability from.

Just ask the users of its solar products...or IoT devices..dead.

The software for Unifi Video has never been open source from my knowledge. I'm not sure if any of Ubiquiti software is open source.

You can download and install it on your own hardware. But it wasn't open source.

Agreed. I just redid my entire network and went with a Ultimate Dream Machine Pro setup from them. My network has never been faster coming from standard netgear router. Setting up all the necessary VLANs to keep IoT devices away from main network was a breeze and I was able to slap a HDD into it and hook up couple of cameras. System works very well. I just wish the powers were PoE.

I have been trying out UDM/P at home to see if its suitable for clients. Jesus what a buggy product.

Examples

- Stats are completely borked - eye candy that is totally inaccurate and useless.

- Switch ports flapping when saving config

- Port forwarding broken

- No support for my /29 on WAN port

That was just what I came across in the first couple of hours of playing.

> Switch ports flapping when saving config

This bit me and a colleague once in a production environment. Changing trivial details that did not justify a restart of the interface bounced the WAN port and interrupted a couple conference calls.

I absolutely concur. Even on 1.7.2 things are a mess.

Any guides on setting up IoT VLANs for some of us who have UBNT but not the full network knowledge to do the best practice?

I'm no network genius either but I just logged into the unifi console thing and created a new wifi SSID with it's own IP range and then had to reconfigure all my IoT devices to point to the new wifi SSID. That was all I had to do.

Unifi video was markeded to the smb space not home users. I know of zero smb's using nest or ring for their business. That is a consumer product group.

I completely disagree. Their code quality has gone down the tubes. The new UDM/UXG routers have 1/10th the functionality of the previous generation USG and have been buggy from the get-go including such basic functionality as not hard-locking when utilizing an SFP for your WAN ports.

The Unifi Protect software isn't even close to feature parity with Video and there's not even a hint that it will get there before they EOL Video. Their largest "hardware" option supports a whopping 4 hard drives and forces you to use RAID-5 across them.

No AI functionality to detect humans/animals/cars, it barely even qualifies as an NVR.

Blue Iris runs absolute circles around Protect and actually has a full feature set for less money and no hardware tie-in. Ubiquiti has been trying their hardest to jump the shark in 2020 and I'm getting closer to dropping them from my network entirely.

> I'm getting closer to dropping them from my network entirely.

What are the best alternatives right now? Planning to do a whole house in the next few months and have been planning on Ubiquiti. I've heard some complaints lately but haven't heard of anything that makes for a good replacement.

My number one requirement is mesh APs with fast handoff. Close second is ease of admining multiple networks and ease of setting up segregated VLANs for IoT stuff.

I recently saw Aruba has come out with a consumer focused line. Given how good their enterprise gear is, I'd imagine it's solid. Haven't used it myself yet but heard good things from friends.

https://www.arubainstanton.com/

For a router I'm back to pfsense/opnsense (haven't decided which one is going to stick).

I've been thinking of Aruba APs and a FortiGate 61F. It'll be more manual setup, but should work fine.

I've got a nice UniFi setup at home (CloudKey G2, USG, 8-port switch, wired AP, mesh'd AP) and it works well, but it's lacking in some frustrating ways.

For example, it advertises DPI, but it doesn't provide data that can guide decisions. It'll group things into buckets, but you can't look at it over any timeframe (doesn't even say when you reset the counters) much less trigger on if anything exeptional happens.

There's also this nifty power widget which you can connect to a cable modem (between it and mains power) and when the internet connection fails, it'll power cycle the modem... not a bad thing for some iffy ISPs. It works, but it doesn't log to the otherwise-reasonably-extensive system logs. So, you never know if it actually DID anything.

The setup here at home works well. The APs are solid, as is the security gateway. But it just seems to lack in some advertised ways; enough so to make me question sticking with them when it next becomes time to upgrade.

So I installed the UniFi smart power plug and it does log. Not much detail, and there are server post in the forms asking for more details on the settings (timeout settings, how long it waits, what it pings, etc.) that have gone unanswered, but it does log. The message in my log is:

{ap} outlet 0 has been power cycled

Running latest GA on CloudKey2.

Really? Thanks! Maybe that changed with an update since I got mine... That's excellent. I'll make a power cycle happen later and affirm things here.

It depends on how enterprisey you want to go, and how much of an all in one solution (fully integrated like the UniFi line). I've started looking at options, and you have:

Prosumer TP-Link EAP

SMB Meraki Go Aruba Ruckus

Enterprise Cisco Merakai

You also have some FOSS options like pfsense and OPNsense for the security gateways. I'd be keen to know if anyone has some good recommendations.

The Meraki Go range looks attractive enough to have APs around your house, but the cloud/app based management concerns me.

>No AI functionality to detect humans/animals/cars, it barely even qualifies as an NVR.

eh.

after having to maintain these systems for long enough i've come to realize that the AI system, if one exists, should be a separate compartmentalized system that is far away (architecturally) from the actual NVR functions.

I'd rather the NVR system be faithfully 24/7 recording (because AIs are imperfect and I need real accountability), and be focused on the job of stutter-free/jitter-free/low-latency/high-resolution recording.

Then , in my experience, it's best to have another system that deals with everything else like scheduling/event notification/ai detection/streaming.

it's a pain logistically, but it's nice to be able to deal with practically everything that is 'NVR-sourced' without touching the recording solution.

((this isn't really Unifi specific; just general IPTV/NVR advice.))

I've struggled running Unifi Controllers in containers, UNMS is fine, but any Java based controllers (UniFi itself and UniFi Video) just consumes memory until it fails.

Also running mongodb in a container seems to constantly leave the database in a state of corruption when the container inevitably fails.

In the end I got a Unifi Cloud Key Gen2+ and now I happily run both UniFi Protect AND the the UniFi controller on it without any issues. The Cloud Key Gen2+ is PoE so I can power it from my EdgeSwitch and it even has a battery backup so it can safely power down during an outage. Definitely worth the $189.

Pretty torn on this one. Really wish I could host Unifi-Protect on prem with my own hardware. Most of their dedicated hardware doesn't even offer raid or decent backup solutions.

It's really a shame because everything else UBNT does is pretty awesome but this one feels pretty shitty.

The combination of video streaming, bring-your-own-hardware, and closed source is just really difficult to get right. For every customer who has a good experience, there are three others who have some kind of persistent issue. There's just no way to deliver appliance-like reliability for a video server without controlling the hardware and OS.

Isn't that what cloudkey/dream machine covers though? The people who provision the types of systems we're talking about are the same that are familiar with how to spec server hardware.

I had no problem with unifi-video, in fact I had better reliability via ZFS zraid then what the dream machine supports with a single disk.

The actual title of the article is "UniFi-Video Products End of Life Announcement". That's very different from this headline. Ubiquiti is very much still in the video business. They're just deprecating the previous generation, which has been a long time coming.

You definition of "long time" and mine are very different. Security camera life cycle is measured in manymany years (min of 5 if not 10+). This move is very sudden for people that have invested thousands of dollars into a security platform only to be told you have 5 months before we leave out out in the cold

Not a good look for UI. I was thinking about using UI protect for myself. But their treatment of UI video customers has me rethinking that

They have been saying the older Video products are deprecated for over a year now, and it’s not like they’ll suddenly stop working either. The nice thing about those cameras is the self-hosting. Nothing changes there, so what’s the problem?

They have been talking out of both sides of their mouth to to ensure UniFi Video NVR customers would keep buying camera's

They have been saying the UniFi Video NVR would be supported for security released until Protect provided the same feature set, then they would give amble notice to transition

Protect does not have the same feature set, nor is 5mos ample time for transition

As far as "nothing stops working" Well things will stop working, remote access for example

Further as one person on the Ubnt site asks "How long will the keep the mobile app in the app stores" if they remove it from the iPhone store and a user upgrades their phone they will have no way to install the app again.

That is just 2 of the huge list of issues that this move brings

Ok, we've changed to the article title. Submitted title was "Ubiquiti Video Products: End of Life Announcement".

The most frustrating part of protect to me isn’t that it only runs on their hardware, but that there’s no way of making the system even a little bit redundant. You can’t back up the system, you can’t stream motion events over the internet etc. It’s very annoying. The only way to get video out of the system is to save clips to a PC with the web app. I know there was some effort to RE the proprietary video storage format, but I don’t know where it went. Otherwise it’s fantastic...

You can get RTSP feeds off the cameras.

Yup setup rtsp per camera and stream into AWS.

Yes, or on-premises. You could use whatever NVR software you want.

Do you know of some replacement software?

I know of ZoneMinder but I haven't used it myself.

SecuritySpy for Mac works well, and supports Ubiqiti cameras.

http://www.bensoftware.com/securityspy/

I've been meaning to check out https://shinobi.video Appears to be a much more modern take compared to zoneminder.

In my opinion, that software is spaghetti code and barely functions when it's actually running. I tried it for a while, but gave up because it constantly lost the stream. I had to go to super low res for 3 cameras with a very low bitrate to make it run stable. I'm surprised someone like ubiquiti doesn't come out with an NVR with object detection built in.

If I have to set RTSP and a secdonry dvr to get off-site backup why would I pay for their overpriced camera's and lose many features

I don't know. Is this a rhetorical question?

Lots of people on the internet like to talk about problems and not give any solutions. I like to focus on the solutions and leave the evangelism and griping to others.

RTSP Streaming is not a "solution" to any of the problems mentioned in the Grandparent's comment about the shortcoming of UniFi protect

it is simply a way to use the UniFi Camera's with another DVR platform in a limited (very Limited) way over a standard like ONVIF which is supported by lots of camera vendors but not Unifi

So if you want to talk about solutions, great but your comment is not really a solution to anything

I have Unifi cameras. It's a workaround to avoid buying all new cameras before you expected to.

Don't project your anger at Ubnt onto me. Sick of the negativity and 'Well actually'isms on this site.

My comment adds a lot more than any of yours have, which is just to dogpile on with more 'I'm mad!' and 'this sucks' bullshit and tears to fill the seemingly bottomless social media reservoirs.

Have some basic respect for others and don't be rude out of the gate talking to complete strangers.

I appreciate you.

I love Ubiquiti, but that's because I'm a home user. I'd never deploy them for a customer.

It was obvious Protect was going to be the only solution going forward as soon as they announced it years ago. I can't fathom the surprise by anyone in that thread, because this is what they do with all of their products.

They announce the replacement, lie about not phasing out the current product, and then two years later phase it out anyways. This happens every single time and should not be a shock when it happens.

Next up is probably EdgeOS. That might be different just because a lot of ISPs use it, but they keep pushing UNMS and some of their new products require it (see their EA store).

I've used EdgeMax and lots of their AP's on customer sites, amazing bang for buck. That said, Ive read future Edge devices are UNMS only. Unifi video always felt like an entry level product for home users only.

Wait really? UNMS only would devalue EdgeMax routers in a huge way...

This thread here -

https://community.ui.com/questions/Introducing-the-all-new-U...

Seem to avoid the question of having a fully featured CLI

404s for me

Looks like that link requires login. One of the UI people responded but it looks like Edgemax wont be further developed.

----------------

Hello everyone,

Like mentioned earlier, the EdgeMAX product line will still be supported and can be managed from the UNMS Controller (now and in the future). The EdgeSwitch and EdgeRouter products also provide an extensive Command Line Interface.

Hi @WISPConsult.com ,

We are planning on releasing many more WISP-focused UNMS hardware devices. The UNMS-S-Lite is only the first announced device that is part of an extensive line of products.

Hi @ednlcna ,

It is also possible to use a self-hosted UNMS instance (on-premises or third-party Cloud provider).

-Ben

Home user also. I will no longer be buying or recommending UI products.

Looks like I am off to find a new networking vendor. Maybe mikrotik

Edge was forked from Vyatta I believe which is now VyOS.

https://www.vyos.io/

Yip, run it myself and its great

Mikrotik is pretty good for ISP-style stuff - CPEs, routers with OSPF, etc. They are rock stable and get long-term support. Great value for the money but don't expect state of the art tech or best performance.

For "better wifi", TP-LINK EAP line of APs is pretty good - they sell controller separately but it works without. Cisco WAP line was good as well, but it was discontinued I think.

But a lot of people are happy with "better" consumer routers, like better Asus (say RT-AX88) with custom firmware - or the ultimate geeky toy, Turris Omnia (I have that one).

None of that will give you the slick UI of ubnt. But it would give you more stability and less planned obsolescence and unnecessary cloud integration.

flashy UI was not the selling point for UI to me, the ability to manage multiple AP's in a single interface and add new AP's to the network seamlessly were the 2 main driving points for me.

If you only have a single AP it is over kill for sure, but if you need multiple AP's then it is a great system

TP-Link EAP systems looks integrating I will have to look into that more. Thanks for the suggestions

The EdgeMax switches / EdgeRouter routers are pretty good and I really like UNMS for managing them. I just wish they'd fix this schism between EdgeMax/UNMS and UniFi -- I have EdgeMax routing and switching hardware, but UniFi access points.

I find that the UniFi versions of the same routers/switches are not quite powerful enough. Perfectly fine for a high-end consumer, but it gets sticky with a more complex setup, IPSec tunnels with the USGs for example vs the same on the Edge Routers.

The downside of mixing/matching UniFi with EdgeOS is that you don't get the seamless UniFi management experience that you would with a USG, UniFi Switch and APs (which is really quite nice).

I invested in a UniFi video system (NVR + 3 cameras) in mid-2018.

It feels quite disheartening that these are considered legacy (unsupported & abandoned) products already..

The title was a little misleading earlier. They are only discontinuing their Unifi Video product, but all the camera hardware is still supported.

I have a Protect and several cameras deployed and I originally ran Unifi Video. I think the Protect product is much better but migrating from Unifi Video blows -- you can't move over your video archives.

Yeah I got that actually (but thanks for clarifying). It's just a pain that the NVR is going to be left to die..

It's interesting to read down the comments on that announcement page. Sounds like a lot of service providers feel like they're getting burned on this move, as their customer are using the services that are about to be deprecated.

Another example, if one were needed, about not building your business on someone else's platform, as it can be removed at any time.

I own 1 camera from them and self-host on my own network behind a VPN, I want no cloud stuff near something as sensitive as cameras in my home.

Ubiquiti have for me always felt like a hardware company that tried to do software, I'm sad I have to find other options than their NVR, but maybe that is the way forward.

Disappointing from Ubiquiti. While I don't use their video products, I was a user of their networking gear, but given this and the lack of quality / bugs in recent releases, the key features that are still missing or barely functional, I will be looking to migrate.

It's long been a bit strange that they had two products. I needed to upgrade onto Unifi Protect as I literally couldn't get the Video app to load, it would just instantly crash.

Protect is nicer, however the app is also fairly buggy. It let's down the quality found elsewhere in their product suites.

Since upgrading to Protect, and rolling out new hardware at a new home, I still need to manually kill the app every time I've used it on iOS. Otherwise it says it can't connect to my system. It'll always work the first time, it'll never work a second.

It's frustrating, and hopefully moving from building two sub-par products, to focusing on one, will improve the experience for everyone.

I have the same issue on IOS. It’s really annoying. I know okay, kill the app and restart it, but trying to get the non-tech family to do that is painful. The concept of closing an app on IOS just does not register (which overall is not a bad thing expect around issues like this).

In my experience, Ubiquiti's software leaves something to be desired. Rather than move to their hardware I'll move to other software. I'll still use their gear, just not the NVR.

I'm totally confused... so it's not the cameras themselves? They just aren't offering cloud managed cameras, correct?

The software will be EOL on 1-Jan-2021, but you can keep running it if you want to. As I intend to as mine is kept inside my home network, running in a container, and not exposed the the world.

They are killing of their cloud based service on 1-Jan-2021.

The cameras are the same. The UniFi video controller is an older relatively flexible NVR software which can be deployed on any hardware. The UniFi protect controller is tied to UniFi NVR hardware such as the cloud key, is pretty slick but not very flexible.

Is a Dream Machine Pro a UniFi NVR protect hardware controller or do we need to acquire the dedicated NVR hardware linked in that page in order to use Protect?

A dream machine pro will run protect. I have a cloud key gen2+ with a 5tb drive that I installed and it works great.

I have this setup as well. I put in a larger drive like you did and the product works pretty well. Sometimes the iOS app won't load correctly but it isn't clear if the problem is on my side or not.

can you archive to NFS?

Protect is their 'hybrid cloud' product. Authentication and remote access are managed by their servers, but the videos are stored locally.

My guess is they managed to re-implement enough features in Protect that, after years of neglect, they could officially kill Video.

It's still not feature complete :-/

From what I've heard, the biggest drawback is that if you have more than a handful of cameras that you want to record in reasonably high definition, then none of Ubiquiti's hardware can keep up.

Well the Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus [1] can record up to 20 cameras.

Their new Unifi Protect Network Video Recorder [2] is supposed to do 50.

[1] https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...

[2] https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...

Their solution before they had bigger/faster devices was to run multiple appliances.

The other pretty big problems are no backup solution, video exports limited to 10 minute clips, cloud account and Internet mandatory (at least for initial setup). What drives me bonkers is no support for valid SSL certificates because they don't want you to have to worry about that or something. It breaks the protect app when you don't use their snakeoil default.

I'd still be using Unifi Video, but they broke the iOS app for like a whole year so it was use protect or switch over to something that took in RTSP from the cams.

This was to be expected, when they talked about deprecating Unifi Video about a year ago they explicitly said that it's not going to be updated so it was just a matter of time until the final EOL-ing.

I've been planning to install cameras at home and was considering Ubiquiti or Synology. What do you folks recommend? I'm looking for something with local storage but still has a slick app.

If you want something that "just works" I would venture down the synology path but be prepared to spend $$$ on camera licenses for any sizeable installation. If you don't mind rolling your own, Blue Iris is probably the most extensible with the downside that it requires far more manual configuration.

I bought a 2nd hand hp i5 to run Blue Iris, poe switch and a couple of dahua cams. The set up was pretty straightforward, there is info on the insanely toxic ipcamtalk site on recommended Blue Iris settings. Basically you need an Intel CPU to support hardware encoding and use less power, and specific setting to save the vids without reencoding.

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