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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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