It looks like better ONVIF support is coming to UniFi Protect

Arjun said:
I wonder if there is any tangible difference when it comes to performance and load times on the G2 NVRs given the fact that they have 4 times the RAM as the UNVR and 256SSD cache. It gets prohibitively expensive when you add additional AI Ports and opt for the G2 NVR. Presently, I only use 2 AI Ports, 1x for Legacy UniFi Cameras, and 1x for the dedicated LPR
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I haven't tried out the G2 yet but when it comes to standalone NVR from Hikvision, Dahua and Luminys, when the detection is done by the NVR itself then you will start noticing slowdowns when switching menus and loading video streams. I imagine it would be the same for the G2. Trying to have one unit do more things at once like accepting the video stream, sending the video and metadata to the hard drive for logging. Logging all the metadata so it could be searched.... Creating the thumbnail for everything and now having the G2 doing the metadata generation.... I guess that is why for ONVIF cameras the G2 won't do LPR or face. Not enough processing power.

There is never a one unit fits all it seems and that's why I run multiple units. Unifi Protect with its set of data. Hikvision NVR with its metadata that it is getting from the Hikvision cameras and a Dahua NVR with its metadata from those Dahua cameras. Yeah... pretty redundant but..... Here is a true story..... A year ago I had someone teaching their mother in law to drive and instead of braking, she floored it and smashed through my fence into the side of my house. The Dahua NVR went offline as that wall where the car came through was where it was housed cutting the power. The Unifi and Hikvision units are situated in other parts of the house and still recording. Ever since I have continued this concept. Better safe than sorry. Well.... I guess it didn't help that I have different brands of cameras and I wanted to see the metadata from each ecosystem from each set of cameras hence so many recorders....
 
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lewic said:
I've never had my cloudkey corrupt itself so I may just be lucky. I have had my cloudkey gen 2 plus running for roughly over five years now. Now I have had issues with it though. Mine is one of the original versions of those that has the battery that goes bad and bloats/expands. Had to tear the whole thing down and pull out that battery. It is now battery-less. Also the POE went out on it so not able to power it up using POE. The port still passes data though. Just have to use a USB-C adapter to power it up. Also the mechanical hard drive showed it was dying after a year of cooking inside that enclosure. Replaced it with an SATA SSD and no issues along with less heat overall after that.
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Looks like I jinxed myself saying this the other day. Yesterday it showed my network was down but all the AP's and NAS were still running. Went to check my server room and the cloudkey was showing the "fallback IP address". Unplugging the network cable from the cloudkey did trigger a reaction on the display as it says "ethernet disconnected". I originally thought the port finally died since it was an old cloudkey. Plugging the cable back in it still went to the fallback IP address. Wasn't able to log into this address either. Ended up having to factory reset the unit and then load a backup config once it rebooted. Strange. Still don't know what caused it. Don't see anything in the logs as the unit was reset so not sure if there was an update that caused it. I honestly doubt it as it was in the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night where I set it to automatically update. Now.... The unit does say that Unifi Protect... the cameras were maxed out but stats on the cloudkey don't show high cpu usage or ram usage was at 80%. Maybe a sudden rush of motion on my cameras triggered an influx of data going into the cloudkey as I have my cameras set on variable bitrate? Hard to say what happened.
 
Arjun said:
I kept mine at Medium only
Too many false alerts - the AI Ports eliminated them as I relied exclusively on the AI Ports only not ONVIF on UniFi Protect
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Do you have to adjust the camera resolutions on the 5442's in order to get two cameras per AI port?
 
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Defender574 said:
Do you have to adjust the camera resolutions on the 5442's in order to get two cameras per AI port?
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Correct, see if you can adjust the resolution in UniFi Protect one camera at a time instead of the camera's UI; this way you can still record in 4mp resolution if you are using another system to supplement your setup
 
I set the main stream in the camera interface to 2560x1440 and have no issue pairing two 5442s to a single AI port.
 
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Seems a lot of the cameras release in the past two years or so would list a 4MP camera with a resolution of 2688 x 1520. If this is the case, the AI Port would count this as a 4K meaning you can only add one camera to that AI Port. The resolution cannot be over the 2560 by 1440 in order for it to be classified as a 2K and allow two cameras per AI Port. From my testing and usage nothing over 1440 if you want to do two cameras on the same AI Key. With that being said, using some panoramic cameras which are technically 8MP.... My camera is 4096 x 1860. It wouldn't let me add it to the AI Port as it expects the resolution to be 3840 x 2160 max. Since the first number is over the 3840, it wouldn't even accept the camera to be added into the AI Port. So if the horizontal or vertical is out of the specified range, it would either mark it as a higher resolution or not allow the use of it. I even had a 12MP camera which has a resolution of 4512 x 2512 when it gave a notification saying the resolution exceeds what is able for the AI Port to handle. So I would say some specialty cameras that are either higher resolution or ones that have multi-lens are mostly a no go. Multi lens it would only let me use one lens and ignored the others. I did add a 6MP fisheye with success though.
 
Arjun said:
Correct, see if you can adjust the resolution in UniFi Protect one camera at a time instead of the camera's UI; this way you can still record in 4mp resolution if you are using another system to supplement your setup
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Well I broke down and snagged an ai port and rack mount for 6 ai ports. Curious to see how they perform. Just rebuilt the homelab so there is plenty of space to add some new toys to play with.Homelab.JPG
 
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Defender574 said:
Well I broke down and snagged an ai port and rack mount for 6 ai ports. Curious to see how they perform. Just rebuilt the homelab so there is plenty of space to add some new toys to play with.View attachment 247030
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AI Port is crucial for people like you and me who don't use Ubiquiti cameras in their setup and use ONVIF cameras mainly
 
Arjun said:
AI Port is crucial for people like you and me who don't use Ubiquiti cameras in their setup and use ONVIF cameras mainly
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In Protect I have different recording options for all of my 5442 cams. One cam shows the high quality and low quality streams to choose from. One show's the high qulaity and lets me disable the low quality stream, and the other does show any of the options. Have you experienced this issue?

To follow up on that, Ive read that the ai ports often fall back on using the low quality streams and l would like to disable the low quality streams.
 
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Defender574 said:
In Protect I have different recording options for all of my 5442 cams. One cam shows the high quality and low quality streams to choose from. One show's the high qulaity and lets me disable the low quality stream, and the other does show any of the options. Have you experienced this issue?

To follow up on that, Ive read that the ai ports often fall back on using the low quality streams and l would like to disable the low quality streams.
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Can you post some screenshots? I’m doing the exact same setup right now and noticed different options for recording depending on it being paired to an AI Port. Another issue I’m having is the T54IR-ZE-S3 camera is configured to 2560x1440 but it only seems to be coming through at 1920x1080, especially when downloading footage. I have a B54IR-Z4E-S3 that is downloading at the correct resolution so I’m not sure what the issue is.
 
vinmassaro said:
Can you post some screenshots? I’m doing the exact same setup right now and noticed different options for recording depending on it being paired to an AI Port. Another issue I’m having is the T54IR-ZE-S3 camera is configured to 2560x1440 but it only seems to be coming through at 1920x1080, especially when downloading footage. I have a B54IR-Z4E-S3 that is downloading at the correct resolution so I’m not sure what the issue is.
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All are the T54IR-ZE-S3. Some through Protect show the High and Low quality streams. One shows no streams to choose from and my newest added camera let's me disable the low quality stream. Currently chatting with support...

T54IR-ZE-S3​



Disabled .pngNo Disabled.pngNo Options.png
 
vinmassaro said:
Are those the settings under the camera itself? I don’t have those at all. Are they paired to AI Port?
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Don’t have my my ai port yet. But yes these are the individual camera settings within Protect.
 
Yeah I’m on EA ver. 7.2.97
 
Ok, that makes sense, I see an entry in the release notes about improvements to ONVIF for 3rd party cameras. I'm going to update and will report back.
 
Ok, looks like some good improvements in this EA firmware. If I disable Substream 2 and 3 in the native camera interface, they still seem to appear as options in Protect. Maybe disabling them does not hide them when read over via ONVIF. Either way, it's nice being able to choose the default Main stream for Protect High Quality (HQ) and Substream 1 for Protect Low Quality (LQ), because I wasn't sure what I was getting before. This has also fixed the issue I mentioned where I was only getting 1920x1080 - seems it was reading Substream 2 which I had not even noticed. Choosing "High Quality (MediaProfile_Channel1_MainStream)" for HQ now gives me the proper 2560x1440 stream. I downloaded a clip and I am getting the right resolution and 20FPS framerate set from the native camera interface.
 
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