Lately I have been testing camera.ui  from https://cameraui.com/

A bit of the background is that I have had Home Survailliance for meny, many years - never with a physical NVR, always some homemade solution.

The closest to a NVR / Not homemade was a Security system Sikkert Hjem Alarmsystem

Ive used Plex and Jellyfin as NVR's - Making a simple NVR (Frigate) Alternative

Ive testet Zoneminder and a lot of other systems.... 

Latest was Scrypted - wich was very impressive, but fell on the disk size requirements, I dont want to purchase extra disks – and I have no real 24x7 record needs.

I actually also tested camera.ui  for 2-3 years ago and was impressed, but some core functionalities did not work at all.

So I was suprised of the re-incarnation of camera.ui from the developer.

So - back to the new https://cameraui.com/ that Ive bee testing the last three weeks - and in short: Its impressive and have fixed my reolink 510 cameras problematic video stream (I assume)... See below.

Overview - What I like

The whole technology stack is very modern and the UI is super quick to use and explore. There are also an MacOs client and the Interface is also accessible and upcoming AppleTV and iPhone clients.

The setup and use of plugins are very well implemented - server and plugins can be installed and upgraded in the UI itself.

All cameras have a lot of options and ui configurations - I have Reolinks, a Coral USB Stick and an Intel N150 for use (with the OpenVino plugin).

In the settings for the cam I can define streams etc:

. . . .

The UI is so much better than Frigate that never suited me at all. Also a lot of Frigate (pre V18) was a big yaml file - in camera.ui its all in the UI  

Event Recording

As stated - I dont need 24x7 - So Ive set up all recordings to capture events only - Here I can select if I want to use the Reolinks builtin detections, or a plugin - OpenVino to detect on a stream; the latter being better.

So I get recording on all cams:

Its easy to click and event and see the video, clip or go the the Recordings and see all or search on a cam, a person, an object etc:

Ressources usage

With 5 Cams and OpenVino enabled for all, I never saw execcive ressouce usage, even though Camera.ui uses FFMPEG - know for being quite ressouce consuming.

Face and object recognition

Ive been testing it a bit and object recognition seems to work fine - way better than the built in in Frigate, that could see pretty much any object as a person.

Currently, my setup for face recognition is just as bad as the one I had in Frigate - I'm not sure what it actually takes of video quality and distance to make this work well...

Camera Grids and other stuff

There is a lot I have not tried and some I have just touched:

• Camera grid - With (only) 5 Cams I relly only need one
• Workers - It seems that Camera.ui can offload work and use other ressouces - I guess that is why the website claims "Professional" NVR and seems to be for a small and medium business also.
• Sensors - not tested
• Automations - not tested

Problem solved: Defect videos are not an issue

Lastest Ive been engaged to Frigate with go2rtc - but (also for Scrypted) several recordings simply did not work or stuttered severely, leading to Frigate just showing the red ring and "loading...."

This does not occur anymode - perhaps because camera.ui has a Reolink plugin that utilises the propetary protocol Baichuan from Reolink cams - used internally in Reolink ecosystem instead of RSTP.

Of couse there is also RSTP or ONVIF support, and there are Pluings for other types like Ring or Tuya cams. See the Plugin list