r/UnifiProtect

I was hoping if someone can help. HOA is going to be getting a camera system and I was put in charge. Looking for an installer with experience in ubiquiti.

I went through the installers website but it seems my job is too small for them. I would love any help!

Posting scope of work

"Its going to be at a double gate. We have one of those gates that require a code to get in. Probably a camera at every corner for a total of 4 g6 turret cameras. I believe some concrete has to be dug up to run some cabling. Also looking at an outdoor enclosure (im assuming it has to be air conditioned) to enclose a dream machine, and poe breakout. Going to be using a 5g max running for complete cellular. Im aware I need one of those business cellular plans that have no data caps.

Im not too keen on having an outdoor enclosures if you got any other ideas. I did think about that camera they have that has protect built in.

Now this is my design, if anything else is recommended im open to any input."

Moin,

Ich habe obige Kamera in einer Ecke mit Sicht auf den Hof installiert. Nachts, wenn das Licht aufgrund von detektierter Bewegung angeht, reflektiert die helle Hauswand so stark, dass das Bild auf dem Hof sehr dunkel und am Hauswandbereich überbelichtet dargestellt wird.

Kennt ihr eine Möglichkeit, wie ich das Problem beheben kann?

Das markieren der Hauswand als privaten Bereich ändert leider nichts.

Vielen Dank schon Mal

TL;DR: Public K-12 district with ~350 cameras is evaluating UniFi Protect as a replacement for Verkada. We already have a 10 Gbps managed private WAN, dedicated camera VLANs, mostly Cat6 cabling, and Meraki/Catalyst switching. I’m looking for real-world experience from people running 250+ cameras, especially G6/G6 Pro: reliability, NVR workload, storage, 1 Gbps IDF uplinks, video quality, support, and what you wish you’d known before deploying.

I’m the Technology & Safety Director for a public K-12 district in the Southeast. We’re evaluating whether to replace Verkada with UniFi Protect as our older camera fleet ages out.

We have roughly 350 cameras across four locations, including about 135 classrooms and 50 exterior cameras. Two schools share the same physical campus and the District Core. Our current camera fleet is about half the Verkada D30, D40, and D50 domes with the other half being newer CM41 mini domes in Classrooms.

Our infrastructure is already fairly camera-friendly:
10 Gbps managed private WAN
Moving toward 3 Gbps Internet
Dedicated camera VLANs/subnets
Mostly Cat6 camera runs already in place
Meraki/Catalyst switching
Current IDF uplinks are largely 1 Gbps fiber, with 10 Gbps at the core
Future switch purchases will have 10 Gbps-capable fiber uplinks

I’m not replacing good switches just for this project, so I’m especially interested in whether 20–30 cameras behind a 1 Gbps IDF uplink has been an issue in real deployments.

My current camera thinking is standard G6 for normal coverage/classrooms and G6 Pro where low light, distance, optical zoom, or identification quality justify it. I’m also watching G6 Edge closely.

For recording, I’m leaning toward local NVRs rather than sending all recording traffic across the WAN, probably with ENVR Cores at the two larger locations.

My G6 Pro pilot is currently around 16 Mbps / High Quality, and ideally I want to stay toward the higher-quality end. Smooth motion and usable detail matter more to me than minimizing storage costs.

The biggest unknown for me is the NVR side.
I’ve managed Verkada for years, but I’ve never managed an NVR at all, much less several NVRs supporting hundreds of cameras. I’m also essentially a one-person Technology department, so I can’t save money on licensing only to create another full-time job maintaining storage, drives, firmware, permissions, exports, and recorder issues.

Principals also need to be able to find and export their own footage. I cannot become the district’s human video-search button.

I’ve spoken with another public K-12 district in the Southeast running nearly 1,000 UniFi cameras across multiple ENVRs, and their experience has been positive enough that they’d deploy Protect again.

For those running 250–1,000+ cameras, I’d love to hear:
- Camera/NVR/HDD failure rates and how long you’ve been running it
- How much ongoing NVR maintenance actually takes
- Whether 1 Gbps IDF uplinks have caused problems
- Real G6/G6 Pro bitrates and motion quality
- Real-world retention versus what you calculated
- How well multi-NVR management works
- Whether non-IT staff can reliably find/export footage
- Your experience when you actually need Ubiquiti support
- Any firmware/update horror stories
- How outdoor cameras hold up in serious heat, sun, storms, bugs, etc.
- If you came from Verkada/Avigilon/Genetec/Axis/etc., what did you miss?

Most importantly:
What has been worse about Protect than you expected?
I’m already interested in the platform. I’m trying to find the ugly parts before committing to ~350 cameras.

I received a G6 Turret today that is different from the last one I got a month or so back. I haven't seen anyone mention this. I'm in Canada.

I don't know if there is any difference in the internals, still the same FOV, resolution. Physically though they have changed the mount. I've seen people complain in the past about the gap (bug access) at the bottom between the camera globe and the case it turns in, that now has a filler in there. The white ones used to come with a black mounting plate, now it is also white. It has changed some for the 4 screws, used to be a cone shaped hole and now it is flat (better). The mount now has a couple spring loaded pins that help hold the camera on until you screw in the grub screw. The grub screw has also changed a lot. It is now on the base and activates a catch that holds the camera instead of being on the camera and tightening against the mount.

I had 5 cameras that were stuck on "Preparing Update..." for a few days. I was getting a notification from the NVR about every 10 minutes "Multiple UNVR devices are ready to update". The 5 cameras are 1 AI Pro, 1 G6 Turret, G5 Bullet, and 2 G5 Pro Turret Ultras. They're all connected to the same UDB-8 (Device Bridge) switch fairly high on a private utility pole in front of my house, the distance is not far from the dedicated AP AC-PRO because there is no Fiber or CAT cable to the pole, only power. It seems the update requires a lot of bandwidth. Seems they all need to be off except the one camera updating to 5.4.122.

Things I've tried:

1. Power cycling the cameras (physically removing the 120V cord)
2. Restarting the UNVR

My solution was turn off all POE, and turn the ports back on 1 at a time to do this Update. That worked! Seems there is too much data traffic being transmitted for any of them to be updated with the cameras all sending their feeds to the UNVR. I wanted to get all updates completed before updating to UNVR-PRO-G2. I trust this will help someone with a similar concern.

I’m planning to use a removable Android tablet as my main Home Assistant wall dashboard with UniFi Protect and a UniFi doorbell.

My understanding is that HA can detect the doorbell press, show the live camera feed and provide controls such as gate/door access, but it can’t currently provide native two-way voice through the UniFi doorbell.

What I’d like is:

Tablet normally shows the HA dashboard.

Doorbell is pressed.

HA automatically wakes the tablet and opens the UniFi Protect app.

I answer and use two-way audio through Protect.

When finished, the tablet automatically returns to the HA dashboard.

Has anyone successfully set this up on Android? Can HA reliably launch Protect on a doorbell press and then return the tablet to the HA dashboard afterwards?

I help out at a children's camp. They've had two generators stolen from the garage. I have one camera looking at the parking lot and plan to put another looking at the two garage doors. But a) they're coming in from the woods avoiding the parking lot and b) if they're not completely stupid, they're probably using masks to hide their identity.

What items should we install to alert us of after hours usage to somehow Open the garage doors (there are two they could access). And probably an audible alarm and a notification to the admins.

When I view the video feed i want to me able to scroll my mouse wheel and have it zoom on my mouse and then click and drag the image to pan around.

Am i missing a setting to be able to do this? Id drives me crazy.

Thanks!

Seems there is an obvious product missing from the range - a UNVR with support for an NVMe drive (and ideally with support for 8 PoE cameras). Basically a product just like the UCG Fibre, but without the Network side. If it were the same size/form factor as the UCGF, all the better - they could sit nicely in a stack then.

I wouldn't mind shifting my Protect load (6 cameras, plus Doorbell & Chime) off my UCGF (and my Max 16 PoE switch) - but I definitely want the responsiveness of the internal NVMe vs. using an old spinner HDD.

(Obviously there are rack based solutions but at the moment I have no rack and no plans/need to move to that approach currently).

My frig has bifolding doors. When I close one side too hard, the air pressure pops the other side open. If I don't catch this the door stays ajar. After 5 min. it starts to quietly beep. By this time I'm no longer in the kitchen and don't hear it. The kitchen has a G4 instant which has a mic. I usually tun the mic off. Is it possible to set an alarm that listens for this beep (which I have digitized).

We have about 70 cameras on 3 NVR Pros across multiple sites with additional expansions planned. We're currently using micro workstations hooked to tvs in several offices for live view of cameras. However, instead of the 9 or 12 that fit on a TV screen, we're looking to have one or more views that will automatically cycle through multiple cameras across locations. It looks like Protect and Vantage Point don't have this option, so can anyone recommend software to set this up?

Thanks.

Hey All

We used to have a milestone installation in 1 office with about 15 Sony cameras.
For the newer building next to it there was a unifi cloud key gen 2+ with 6 cameras.

I want the milestone server gone (it's old, power hungry, loud,...). I tested a 3rd party camera on the cloud key and it was perfect. We don't do cases or AI stuff (at least not today).

I thought 21 cameras would be stretching it so we bought a UNVR. I moved protect from the cloud key to the unvr and let the drives sync up.

Then I started adding the 14 remaining 3rd party cameras. First 8 cameras went without a hitch. But 9, 10 and 11 are giving me failures saying "wrong credentials" when I try to adopt them.

The credentials are correct, I checked, the onvif streams are activated, CPU is at 20% and memory at 39%. Kind of at a loss here... Is the amount of onvif devices limited in a config somewhere?

Do we know what package is being used and where it's config file is? I don't really see how I best troubleshoot this...

Human rights

I've got a UNVR at home and I like it

At work we have an avigilon system with a whole mix of cameras

I've run out of camera licences on the avigilon system (waiting on quote for more) but I'm tempted to jump ship to ubiquity

already have ubiquity router/switches/a few cameras on that system

but... the avigilon playback is really nice... it's like you see on cop shows on tv, pick the cameras and slide the mouse around the time bar and it'll fast forward/rewind though the recordings like you're scrolling through a downloaded film

don't want to swap to the ubiquity enterprise nas if the playback etc. is the same as the consumer one I have at home, it's a bit clunky/harder to navigate :-o