 All right, so today we're going to take a look at the Unify Video NVR. Now not the actual device, we're just going to roll our own on a standard Linux box that will run the Unify cameras. Now the way it works is you can get the Unify cameras and then you can buy the Unify NVR. But if you want to roll your own NVR, it has support for a lot of different platforms including Linux, which makes me really happy. And so it works for you in the same way that the Unify wireless devices work where you have the controller software that they can sell a cloud key for, or you can roll it, get your own controller, load it up yourself on a Windows or Linux box. I think Mac might be supported too. Let's look at the downloads. And yep, just, sorry, no, sorry Mac folks. It's Windows 7, an 864 bit, Ubuntu 64 bit, Ubuntu 64 bit 14 and Debian. So we're going to go Debian 7 AMD 64 and we're going to copy the URL. I'm going to show you how to set up and configure the Unify server here. So I'm going to get this out of the way and I've already got that URL copied and pasted here and ready to download. So we are going to, I'm already logged into my box, it's going to become the Unify box. I'm going to get the file, all right, and now we're going to set it up. Now this is the same Unify box that I'm running my other Unify things on. So we're just going to keep it all consolidated and the part that's going to be important when we get to is the storage because by default when this sets up, it's going to want to store everything to this box. This box is actually a virtual machine, so I have a map to my free NAS storage box where that's where we're going to move the video. So we'll get to that part after it sets up. So we're going through the installer and it failed, which is what the way it's supposed to. I have to get install-f and it'll fix all the dependencies that are missing. So we'll go ahead and do this. Yep, looks like it didn't need much because we have the other Unify software on here. All right, and it started. So now let's get the program going. So the URL is going to be the IP address of the server that you're using, colon 7443. The Unify wireless is on 8443, the video runs on 7443. So we're going to head and proceed, name it, call it LTS, I'll agree to the Terms and Service. All right, now it's setting it up. Now the second part was the password for the cameras. So that way you can access the cameras directly by putting the password in them. So I had a different password I put in for the cameras versus the password I put in for the device. All right, and now we're in the system. Now we've got to find the cameras. I'm going to go plug them in now. All right, so the cameras plugged in and ready to go. Now you have your managed cameras, which we have none, and we got our unmanaged cameras, which we have right here. But before we add the camera, there is a little step I want to do, and I mentioned earlier that I have to use an external storage. And I'll just quickly cover this, skip it if it's not relevant to you. So my machine here is virtual, and because of that it only has a 60 gig storage, which is perfectly fine because we're not using that much of it as you can see. Being loaded with both the Unify systems on here is using 12 gig, including the OS, but that's not enough for storage. So right here, I have a NFS mount to the video storage, and I'm in the Unify folder where it stores the video, which is varlib unify-video. There's an equivalency on Windows as well, but we're covering this one specifically on Linux. So we can see that the, what's stored here in the videos folder, which we haven't recorded anything, so it's actually empty. We are going to remove it, remove the video folder, if I can type right, rf, then we're going to link. There's nothing in there, so there's nothing worry about deleting there. I'm going to do a symbolic link, storage, video storage, to videos. I'm going to go ahead and restart the service in case there's any weird issues it has with me changing directory. Alright, now one quick test is to do this. So su, the Unify video, touch test. There is a test file there, which means it has permission to write there, which is what I wanted. Now that's basically just offloading the storage, so it's not on here. So if we look again now, we see that the storage array that I attached to this on FreeNAS, I set up 2.1 terabytes for storage on there, because we're going to be using this for a lot of different video stuff just here at the office. And if we look at how it's done now, you can see that the videos are to storage slash video storage, so they're being redirected on there. Alright, enough of this, exit out here, and go back over here, because I restarted it and it wants me to log back in. Alright, now we can start managing the cameras and setting them up. So we're going to go ahead and adopt it. The default password on any camera out of the box is U-B-N-T, U-B-N-T, manage. And then we've got to wait for it to turn green. Alright, so the camera is now green and ready to go. Now it's kind of cool because you can just jump to any camera and do a live feed. Now we only have one camera here for testing. There's a delay, so now you see me in the thing, and there's a delay if you're watching a video. So there's a webcam, there's a delay to this. So let's turn on recording here. So we go to recording. By default, they don't record. So we're going to say record only motion, record full at 1080, and we're going to hit save, and it's going to start recording videos. Now it also has this ability to zone out pertinent pieces, so we can actually draw on this to resize and reshape the way it does so we can mask out areas and say ignore motion in those areas, which is pretty cool. I like this feature. You can also, when I manage here, we're going to just call this our demo camera. That way it has a name. And anytime you want to jump to the live view, you know, you just right here, you can go full screen on it, twice as much of me. You can grab a snapshot, and we can see that it's recording only motion, and because I'm in motion, it's going to be plenty of recording. We can override resolution settings, turn on RTSP service if you wanted to stream to something else as well. This is our live view, all cameras, and because we only have one, it lets you create different views here. So if you have a multi-camera setup. Now, I've seen a few people ask this in, you know, Unify responds in kind all the time. It only works with Unify cameras. It does not work with other cameras. And of course, the reason for that, they give away the software for free. There's no licenses or anything for this. So the whole purpose is to sell their product. They give you the tools in order to sell it. So that's what this is. They give you free software. You can roll your own on a Linux box or a Windows box, and then you buy up all their cameras. So they give you software in order to buy it. Now, it also has the map view. And this is the same default map that we get on the Unify system for the wireless as well. So it's that same kind of weird industrial, but you can upload your own map. So they have the sample map. You can add a new map, select a map. And then from here, you can do the same things. You can actually point where the cameras are, kind of reposition. I see it doesn't know for sure. It just knows the type of camera. But this is kind of cool. You can start identifying all the cameras when you're editing the map, which I really like. That way you can click on any camera and jump right to a live feed of that camera wherever it is inside of your map. So it's really like the way Unify integrates this right into the web interface, because from a client's perspective, we've done this before in a couple of clients where we've plotted out and drawn their entire facility and put their Wi-Fi on there, and we can put their cameras on there, upload the tool, and they have a very clear understanding. They go, I want to see that camera, not just by name, but now they know physically where that camera is in their place. And this is just really handy for the Unifies. It makes them really easy to use. You have your standard Unify interface for adding users, so you can add different users in here. Whether or not they have access to the API, then we have the alerts. You can configure alerts in here, too. I have the firmware update, and I updated it. I forgot to show you guys that. I already clicked on it, but it notifies you firmware updates. It notifies you of camera going down, then your settings file. Now, camera password is interesting. We'll just set it to one, two, three, four, and hit Save. And what that is, is the camera passwords, and you've seen this at the very beginning when I was setting it up. You can have a separate camera password from your password, so you have your credential login, so you can log into the NVR system and login remotely on your phone. But then you also have your cameras, so you can log in every individual camera. So let's go click on it, and it'll log us right in here. Now, the username for the camera, UBNT still, and let's go put in one, two, three, four, and we're into the camera directly now. And that's the only confusing part is that the username doesn't change on the cameras. They just stay that way. And this is where you can enable the external accessory, which you can do that inside of here as well when you're managing the camera. So manage, I think you can turn that on in here. Maybe you can't. Oh, yes, you can't. Oh, yeah, right here. Right here, external accessory. This is an accessory device that they have on this particular model to extend the IR range. So you can do that. You can configure the network settings in here. And I don't know if you can configure them. Yeah, this tells you what it picked up, but it doesn't let you set it. So if you didn't want it to be DHCP and you wanted to do a static, you could go here and choose a static and type in the IP address and save the changes directly to the camera. Show video so you can see the live feed. And general system information. If you want to upload a custom firmware, view the camera log, download support fire, reset to defaults, or just the general camera log itself, which is kind of cool. Looks like the date's not set in the camera. So they're pretty easy to use. I like the interface. They keep it really clean. It's not ambiguous. I like the way they have a little photo of the camera inside of here. Really handy. And while I'm in here looking at stuff, it's not messing with this. This is still working. So here's the timeline for recordings. It's still building that. So let's look at the recordings themselves. So there's a motion detection in progress, and it plays back the audio. It can grab a still out of here. So if you wanted to still grab, then there's an option to actually download the file, which is right down here. So if I wanted to download this one, which we're actually going to do in here, so I'm going to insert and show you what the video looks like when we do this. So let's go ahead and grab the camera and jump over here live. Make sure I got it framed right. So this is right out of the camera. This is how it sounds. Kind of give you a look around. It's kind of low light here in my office, but the video is really good. The quality on these cameras is pretty outstanding. Maybe we'll do some other demo tests later when we get these installed outside somewhere. But the quality of the camera and the quality of the audio is not bad. You can understand. It doesn't sound as nice as my Blue Yeti microphone, but it's still pretty good. I'm going to go back over here to the recordings. No one's still in progress, but like I said, you can just download them. They save as standard MP4s. So here's like an MP4 download. I like this a lot because a lot of the other camera systems have their weird, strange formats they download in. And that makes it a pain, because especially all these people with the Chinese NVRs that are super generic, like Night Owl and a few others, they record in random formats and then need special conversion tools. And they're just strange. They're just, they make it kind of a pain in the butt. And then some of the other commercial products are the same thing, the export and the special format. We know because she had to deal with a lot of police departments where we've helped people do conversions because we have a lot of lawyers, including defense attorneys. So what happens is they hand them a DVD and there's a tool that has to be loaded and set up to view the file. And then there's an export tool that you have to run. It's kind of a pain in the butt. So the lawyers actually bring them to us to convert for them. And it's really just aggravating. So the timeline feature is pretty neat. It takes a little while for it builds it up, but what it's doing is you can jump to certain spots and it's sensing each part of the motion recording. So you can go through, pick the camera and jump between where the motion records were. It's a, you know, if it detected motion somewhere and you can play that particular part. So it's really nice the way all that works. They keep it really clean. This is probably my favorite NVR interface because the majority of the NVRs have just horrible interfaces. Like there's no thought process put into it. So I'm really happy with the way the system works. We're going to, when we next time we build one, I'm going to do a demo of a big system. We have a couple of bids out for some larger systems and I'll do a demo of a bigger one. But this is kind of just giving you an idea of how it, how you get it going, how you set it up. It's really straightforward. I'll do a separate review of the different cameras as I get somewhere ordering some more of them for demos. You know, we've used some of the exact vision, some of the other high end products. And I just don't like the interface near what I like, the Unify interface here. Now a cool note here, and it's kind of small to read. This is the storage directory that it drops it into and it, because I'm recording this on April 2nd, it actually goes 2017, 4, 2 for the camera on there. So everything's an MP4 file right within here. So the actual raw storage itself is MP4. So they're not doing any weird conversion for that. So that's kind of neat too. And it captures a certain amount of metadata that went with this, including it looks like some screenshots that are in here of when the motion started. So really, I like this. This is all like complete normal sane ways to do it, not some weird format that someone found and invented to make the NVR system work, which, you know, I guess that makes it that much more impressive that it's, it's simplistically done. It's not super complicated. It's easy to navigate, easy to view the timeline here. And let's take a quick look at the phone app next. All right. So when you open up the app, it actually wants to sign in with your UBiquity account if you're using that, but we're going to go ahead and connect directly to the NVR. Now if you're on the same network, it auto discovers it and found the NVR right here. And we can put in a username and password. So the first thing you're presented with is a list of all the cameras. So this is the demo camera. It grabbed like a screenshot. I got my keys that I moved over here. The camera wants to roll away on me because it's kind of round. So it would list all the cameras here. There's only one. So it doesn't list. You'd scroll through all the different ones on here. You can hit through the recordings so we can look at the different recordings at different times, play them back right away. It does play back the audio through your phone. It defaults is on mute, but you can go through here. It gives you the option to delete or lock that so it doesn't get deleted. So I'll go back here to the cameras again. And my phone's going a little bit slow for this due to the fact that it decided it wanted to load some updates when I plugged it in. So we're back over here. So it's pretty basic. But if you need to find or watch the cameras live, you can see them live on here. You can see the recordings on here. There's not a ton of options. You can switch to different NVRs, use the time zone as the NVR knowledge base. So it doesn't offer a ton of features, but I don't know that it really needs to. I mean, a lot of times you just want to be able to look at the cameras, flip through them, pick one, watch it, see if it's what you want to know and done. So it's pretty straightforward. It's pretty basic on the app, but I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily because it's functional. That's the most important. It's very clean. It's very functional. It's very easy to set up. You just map the ports externally, put in the external IP address and boom. It connects, done, saved. And the way the interface works, and we'll go back to the main menu on it, it does have an option to switch NVRs, and you can list all your NVRs right here. So you can actually have multiple offices, multiple NVRs, and just list them all out here, and then you can touch on each one you want. So I kind of like that. So the way that it was designed is not like a one-to-one, so you can only have it all set up for one system, and a lot of them are like that. This one will allow all of the options together. So pretty slick. Like I said, I'm really happy overall with the ubiquity camera system. Oh, one last thing I wanted to cover real quick is the config page. So you go down to settings, and you click on the NVR setting over here to bring up this side menu. So here's where you're going to set the camera password, and some of the other stuff so we can jump around so it closes that. So you go to the user settings, add the users settings, set the camera password, time zone, connection alerts, configure email alerts. But to actually get to like the days record settings, you go to the NVR setting up here, and it brings up this little slide-out menu. And even though we're running this on our own Linux box, it shows the little NVR picture. It doesn't say, because it's not a picture of my box, I guess. So it shows their box. And this is where you can say time-based purging. Keep one week, two week worth of data. You can control that here. Let's just say two weeks for purposes. It's got a database synchronization analysis save button down here that I'm not covering up because I moved it. While they're not, there's updates, statistics on the recording, record hours, memory utilization network, and the log files in case you got to get in some of the log information here. So pretty slick. I don't have a lot of memory. I only got one gig assigned to this virtual machine. But that's actually enough for this to run on right now with this many cameras. I'm sure I'll have to increase that as I get more cameras on the system. But yeah, up to date, check for updates, and it tells you what version's installed on here. Go ahead and save. And we'll go ahead and save four weeks. Save. We're hoping we get a bid soon for a really big job so we can, you know, really mess around with like how large of a system we can do. But like I said, it's really impressive. The system works really well and I'm really happy with it. So if you like the content here, if you have some questions about the bigity camera system, I'll leave a message below and I'll try to reply as best I can or if there's something specifically. I'm going to do some comparisons later of the camera itself and some of the different models. And as always, if you like the content here, like and subscribe. Appreciate it. Thanks.