 Tom here for more systems. We're going to talk about the unify protect video system I Wanted to cover the pros and cons of it a lot of people ask about the system since I recently did a review of the unify at newly released NVR which is a really welcome add-on for it But you know, let's talk about the scenarios that work for this system Why you may or may not want it and I'm going to try to be as objective as possible here to make sure you understand And it may be the right product for you or it may not and we'll cover those parameters But first you like to learn more about me or my company head over to Lawrence systems comm if you'd like to hire short project There's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's the affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel including a link to our patreon if you like become a patreon supporter We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time What's available and what's not so go ahead and check that out frequently and finally our forum If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out say hi and talk tech Our forums are a great place for that. All right now back to the content and we'll start right here Unify protect simply scalable video security scalable plug-and-play network camera system view your live video and recordings anywhere with a free cloud access and mobile Applications buy in the store now, which brings you to their ecosystem of products This is the product I recently reviewed as is this the unify protect viewport PoE Which is actually what is powering the cameras you see behind me. We just hook it up to a TV It's got an htma out. It's really slick and matter of fact It's one of those dead simple devices to use that really like it and I'm really liking where they're going with the Ecosystem on here, but let's go back to some of the products. So we have the bullet camera We have this bullet camera for 149, which is a G3 1080 We have this one here for 499, which is a G4 bullet Does 1440 the pro does 4k for 449 and we have the G3 Pro Which is a very focal full HD 1080 bullet camera Then we have the flex for 79 we have these cool little mini cameras the unify protect G3 Micro's are actually really cool. I've never specifically I don't know if I've specifically reviewed them But they're pretty slick little cameras They have as an option and the unify protect G3 dome camera as far as what you can run these on you can use a unify Cloud key plus you can use the recorder You can use the unify dream machine pro and I've got reviews individually on each of these things But the question I want to answer before we go any further is Yes, the unify system is a very locked-in proprietary ecosystem Therefore no you cannot use other cameras on these other devices So you can't go. Hey, can't I buy these less expensive cameras that I found that cost a whole lot less that offer 4k? No, you can buy those all you want. They're not going to work with unify and VR's. I don't foresee that ever changing What about using these cameras on another system? well, that's challenging because these support the unify format and they support the RTSP and that's where they stop they if you Want to use some of the other like you know an open Omvif standard for connecting these to other ways There's probably some work around way hacky way to do it, but they don't natively support it I've had people mention and try to send me forum posts on it. I'm like, I don't get it If why not just buy a less expensive camera that has a support So if those are things that are Important to you is being able to mix and match or integrate with an existing camera system you have That's not a feature unify supports and I don't expect them to support now If you're wondering about running it on your own hardware That's also a feature not supported and someone had linked before well What about unify video unify video is an abandoned product that we had reviewed previously and that's what introduced us to the unify cameras? Unify video was a software that they had that you could run it on your own hardware build and spec out your own machine But then Mike then they decided to abandon it when they abandoned that they moved over to protect But protect came out long before many devices support it because it Officially I know someone's like well There's a way to get around it and maybe I can figure out how to work it on there That's not a good way to support things, but yes They're I'm aware that there's forum posts about that as well as far as officially from the folks over at ubiquity their unify line of protect devices as mentioned are the only official things that will run on and this unify protect nvr at a msrp of only 299 for this I think that's pretty reasonable for a video recorder That you know can record and handle up to 50 cameras this product I'm reviewing it because this product exists This is something I would probably recommend to people because these other ones all had just single drives And that's just a problem now a few things of note Other what may be a problem for you if you don't want to use this software because you're going hey, what about the AI detection? What about object recognition? Well, no, I don't even see that in a roadmap and by the way a device that cost 299 for the recorder I will tell you it's just not really powerful It's powerful enough to do the recording in event notifications and the functions it was designed for AI takes a little bit more computational power matter of fact Exponentially more depending on how many video feeds you have on there most companies sell and I'm aware there are ways to do this on-prem But most large companies and commercial products sell AI and object recognition as part of a subscription because they take care of the Computational part of it not necessarily on-site, but off-site there are companies that do have on-site servers Where you buy a very hefty server that's able to process this But I'm not going to get too far off track. It's just there's a lot of consumer products out there There's very few that don't have any subscription fees attached to them And this is where unify really shines is buy it once and done This is part of the license fee as far as that goes is why the cameras are generally a little bit more expensive But I do feel the build quality and a solid nature of the cameras They're not cheap, but they they're solid and they haven't been problematic for us for all the ones we've deployed I'm holding the only camera in The through almost two years of deploying these maybe longer that I've ever had go bad And by the way, we've even dropped a couple of these I don't know for sure if this is one of the dropped ones or not But we dropped them and picked them up off the floor and they still worked and I don't mean drop them from five feet They were dropped from ten feet highly don't recommend it We were putting them up in one slept and my tech completely admitted to it We plugged it in and it worked perfectly fine We brought it here back to the office assuming it was broken They put an extra spare they had with them, but we're still using it. It still works the shockingly These have held up really well and these have you know face the elements are out in the weather So the ones we installed with the unified video platform for clients are still out there working away Back to the other topics on this so no AI Definitely disadvantage if you're into that no subscriptions huge advantage and the final thing I love about the cameras ease of use we're gonna get into the easy use of software, but ease of setup They are brilliant at the way they have these configured you throw them all if you all have everything on the same network I'm gonna at least prerequisite that you put all the cameras on the same network with the aviar and Go that's kind of it hit adopt a join all the devices including things like the device behind me They made these things really easy Extremely consumer-friendly now of course we're technical and could do highly technical things and configure these and set these up But it's really nice when you don't have to spend a bunch of labor hours setting up a camera system plug them all in Adopt all the cameras easily name them done that is something for the consumer side Especially when I reviewed the rate rate system over here that the unify nvr has it's very automatic And that same premise across the unify protect line is outstanding also what about like port mapping and apps We'll get to the app which is really nice But it also doesn't require you just make any special changes to your firewall They actually have and it's just they do a nice job of this You go to protect ui.com with your account that you create and you can see that there's no stupid SSL You're you don't see my IP address if my IP address changes or where the nvr changes doesn't matter It just works it goes here and can Go through and have this URL work wherever you oh it works right here inside my office It works outside the office. It works when I go home I can easily do this and this is one-in-one with the app the unify is using their protect that ui site to basically Map everything for you so you don't have to deal with you know port forwards and all those other little details matter of fact from a security standpoint this makes it really easy because now you don't have to worry about oh is There a port open that will potentially lead someone to getting into my network and causing a problem the unify protect server Calls out to unify and basically lets itself known there when you connect to your browser to protect at ui.com You're able to get into the protect software These are really nice features because now every time the client even if they switch internet if they go Hey, we're gonna switch to another provider. We don't go. Oh, man. We got to map these ports We got to move things around Also and kind of related to that the cameras can change IP addresses on the network They don't have to be statically map once they know where the nvr is to talk to on that same network They're able to send their stream of data over to it even if they get a different IP address So those are all the really nice pro features in terms of the system now. What about what does the software look like? Well, nice. It's not hard to figure out. So here's all the cameras that we adopted you can name them We're gonna click on a camera little menu pops up here general east-facing Camera there. We just renamed a camera apply. There's so I spoke camera wrong. So let's actually delete that out Apply that's it. You have these really simple buttons They have an extra IR accessory if you want something so it will have better night vision range We'll show some of the video samples from this You can overlay time camera range the logo the bit rate you can show all the frames frames a second So we will bump it up to like 24 frames a second apply Now it's recording at that. What about recording motion events always never those options are there the cameras I'll have microphones on them Plus on the motion events you can tweak the sensitivity and choose a different motion algorithm not a lot to it But it's there what about zones motion zones. Yeah, we don't want it recording the street So there's the street where cars try by you don't want that setting it off You'd like it to set off only wonders motion in the parking lot So you just drag the zone where you want and it's not any more difficult than that So we can just do this or adjust it double-click and add so we you know Maybe we'll put it right here and raise this one up You can see how easy this is to do or delete or add multiple zones for the motion So really straightforward on there We will actually discard changes we can add privacy zone So if there's some spot where perhaps it's looking over someone's shoulder and you don't necessarily want it to always capture What's on the screen you can add a privacy zone where it'll just block out that particular section And if you're putting these in a place where that's an issue That's is something that's a nice feature on there far as manage You can unmanage the camera and you can disable the microphone on the camera if there's once again for privacy reasons You don't want it recording Really straightforward now. What about finding a scrubbing footage? Well, let's go ahead and look at this by the way This is being recorded and being streamed back from the unify nvr the one I had mentioned and when I did recent review on Time-lapse is part of that feature where we can do that scrubbing and you can see the night vision is reasonable on here It rained the other day So I'm just scrolling up and down to jump to the emotion events now It's logging when there's actually an event where something happened like when this guy comes and skates in the parking lot at night I can jump to those particular pieces of motion So it's really nice the way a time-lapse is between there and it does this for each camera You can jump to a specific date. It's really I like the way this is because from a time-scrubbing standpoint This is so much easier because now I don't have to go through and try and find each event This just works and we can it looks cool She went it rains because you're like, hey look at that now We can go back and look at the back of the office, too We have what we call the Tesla nanny cam you can go to a live feed of it or we can go to the time-lapse And scroll back and forth and watch all the times things happen back here Hey, look, there's Steve grilling so we can jump to that and then make sure he's flipping the burgers properly So pretty straightforward in terms of how all that works and being able to jump to and play each little section of the video And you can also just go through here to the events themselves filter it by camera So we'll say Tesla nanny cam Jump to Steve doing the grill right here And there Steve getting the burgers ready now you can play back the sound if we want And the sound works it picks up a lot of ambient noise, but we've actually found it works pretty good Overall so being able to pick out voices and of course download This is great. This is one of the things that not all the cameras support in terms of other systems I've dealt with too many of them have these weird converter softwares, and it's always annoyed me This is standard mp4. This is completely playback software that I got the full video Here it is with the sound with the audio nice crispy clear 4k video. I just downloaded and You know with the audio I can upload this to wherever I need to if I need to share this even on social media Hey, did you see this person who might have done this thing? They've done such a nice job on that now as far as how the updates go and such as well I will cover that all the way down here when we go over here does the settings of it Automatic updates is amazing. It's just does it. I've been using this for a while And we've yet to have a single automatic update break it it does the update if there's a firmware update for the cameras It pushes those two goes back to that whole Simplicity thing that unifies really focused on and I think they just did a great job on where I don't have to really think About it. We turn these over to people and when we set these up for some customers We don't have a ton of unified protects deployed and not very many of them Mostly we've done some consulting with people who've called in and we've helped them, you know Configure things or configure their networks or configure a land that has this on there And many of them seem to feel the same way we do like this is just simple It may not have the most features compared to other systems, but in terms of simple it is exactly that now The last thing let's talk about is the app. How does the app look on there? How usable is the app? It doesn't work. Well, well, we're gonna actually switch to it on my phone here So I'll show you the app on the phone which has most of the same functionality that we have with the web interface So once you connect to the nvr, you can see the cameras just like you could there You can touch any one camera see the motion events matter of fact the timeline scrubbing works Very similar you just slide your finger back and forth and you can jump to the different events Then you can play individual events back just by touching them We'll go back and look at the one on the back here And we'll go to at least probably where's a motion there we go Steve back on the grill And we can just play back that particular event You can't get much more simplistic than that from a from a standpoint of usability now all the other Functionality in here we can choose if you have more than one nvr adopted for different locations You can hit the pull down and it will show each one of them on there So we have these this is all of our demo accounts and our main account for the nvr the udm pro And this one it just shows them offline once again no mapping. I had to do no actual Setup had to be configured in terms of like mapping ports mapping firewalls you register with your unify account and they show up now One other thing you can do here is set up notifications You can have it have alerts set on here So you can able alerts and it gives you very detailed options. These are options you can control both inside the app on the phone and on the System directly as far as how the alerts go now interesting thing about the alerts is when you're doing these And it does have multi user options that you can do when you're setting up all these alerts You can get kind of fine-grained as you've seen as the options there and their geofence You can have you set up the geolocation of the system You can have it alert you only when your x amount of feet or some radius away from the system Which is kind of nice because that adds a little automation where you go Hey when I'm this close to it with the app don't send me the alert because I'm home when I'm not home or away from wherever I have the nvr installed The app can be sensitive to that and go okay. You're not there. So we should send you an alert wonders of motion So it does have a decent amount of customizability They keep adding more features and it keeps getting better overall though already the reliability on them as wonderful The unify nvr we have is the newest product, but when we were using it on this cloud key for a while The never had a problem. It's survived all the updates It pushed new firmware to all the cameras and never had any issues So my overall feelings are I really like it as long as it fits your use case as long as you're going I don't need a I I don't want to pay subscriptions And I like to say really simple easy to use that you know I can add a couple users add my friends and family whoever it is that you want to share You may have maybe other members of your business other members of your family Maybe you want to have this as a home surveillance system I think it's good for that if you have those really advanced use case and you you know want a System that's really flexible and you can have all kinds of extra Home automation integration with the things like that this system really isn't it right now based on what they offer I don't see any of that I don't have a roadmap if they'll offer that in the future But my overall I'm very positive about the system because well it just works and sometimes that's important and being able To hand end users something an app they can just go on their phone scroll through jump to an event without calling you without having a You know challenge of finding something on their system that means quite a bit So I think that's an important feature of it is that it's easy for the end user and we've shown people how to use the app They go oh, that's it. I thought it required like a degree Is that always the joke people like to make but the simplicity of it? I think it's really good. I'll leave links to the unified protect Reviews I've done before down in the description below to some of the other devices some of the cameras I've reviewed so you can make it You know a more educated assessment of it I'll leave a link to the unify nvr and of course the as we refer to it the magic video tube But the other you know on-screen display device, which is really cool that you can do that It's another nice feature if you want to put it up somewhere talked about that So I think it's a good ecosystem I think it's a pretty good product if it's fits for you use it all right thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video if you liked this video Please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to Lawrence systems calm fill out our Contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums not Lawrence systems calm where we can carry on the discussion about this Video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time