 So we inherited a few clients that have Synology surveillance stations, and it wasn't a product I was already familiar with. This goes back almost two years now, and we've watched these systems get better and better with updates. We were really impressed with the way the system worked and how reliable it's been for the couple clients that we have it. We also did a lot of installs where we were contracted by someone else who was putting these in a bunch of fast-food places, and we did the physical layer, and we found these really easy to set up. So we also deployed a few to our clients, and they've worked really well for our deployments, and they're not too hard to set up. And so I wanted to do a review of both, one, using it for a little while with a few clients, and two, what you need to get started with the surveillance station. Now, the surveillance station software comes with your Synology server, or you can also buy a Synology dedicated NVR that has HDMI out, because the standard surveillance station, such as the one we have here, the DS918+, doesn't have an HD amount for video. And this is a request that comes up all the time. A lot of people like to have that TV wall mount display where they have all the TVs displayed, or all the surveillance cameras displayed on the TV, I should say. Now, the other tools we're going to be using here are currently a Reolink right here, camera, and a Amcrest camera. I'm going to do a review of these cameras separate. They're not bad. The Reolinks, I like a lot. The Amcrest is the inexpensive pan tilt camera that I think has its use case, but like I said, I want to do separate reviews of those. Not leave links where you can buy these. Neither one of these cameras are very expensive. They're both under $100. The list of cameras supported by the surveillance station is huge. We're going to cover that in a second. But let's just dive right into the hardware and some of the options before we get into the software. So this is the one we're using, the Distation DS918+. We have a few hard drives in here, you know, set it up in a RAID. And it's still using all the same features for file sharing and an MVR. It's kind of a nice multi-purpose small business device, which we really like. We've put a lot of these in small businesses and they've worked really well. They also sell, if you want, something more dedicated as the network video recorder to MVR1218. And these are kind of neat. We haven't reviewed these specifically, but I was noticing that this has the feature of up to 12 cameras, which is only a small couple drive system. It comes with a few camera licenses. We'll get to the licenses in a second. But this has the HDMI out. Now, for larger installs where or even if you want to use multiple cameras on a HDMI display, they do sell a visual station. And this is kind of a neat add-on. So you can buy this Synology NAS or even a larger one depending on how many cameras you have for an install. And then you get the visual station, which then allows you via a network connection to bring it to a TV and then actually control it from there. So you could have a monitor or a security room where all the cameras are being watched. And this is a really neat feature. Now, licenses. I know this is like a, well, it's confusion with some people and also a point of contention where they're like, I don't want to have to pay for licenses for everything. The good news and Synology to me did this right. They do have a license fee, but that license fee is one, one time to transferable. I think those are really important features. So if I license these cameras on here and then I buy a new Synology, I can transfer the licenses to the other one. I did contact Synology and this is what they told me it was done. I actually went to one of their seminars and this is, this was a point I wanted to make sure that every time we upgraded a client to a newer, bigger NVR and added more cameras that at least the license we had purchased would come with it. And you do get certain amounts of licenses based on which model you buy. The default, like with our DS918 is only two camera licenses. We have two cameras hooked up, but the license plays license pricing on Amazon. And I granted you can probably find this cheaper elsewhere. I haven't really dug around much. We have vendors that I think on bulk purchases. We've gotten them for less, but one license is 56 for licenses. 100 bring it down like $50 license. And then you get a further discount with the eight license here for 359. So not not unreasonable. And like I said, these are one time per camera that in far as I know changing out the camera, it's a count of cameras that's allowed to be on the system is what you're buying. It doesn't license the camera itself. It just license the count of cameras that are on there. Now they have a surveillance station IP camera support list and this is over 7100 IP cameras from I'm sorry 71,000 from 140 renowned brands. This is a great feature to me because they have so many on the list here. Basically anything that's OMVIF supported seems to be on the list. They have some generic options too because you can even try ones not on the list and it may work with them as well. So this is kind of nice. Now the other advantage of this is and we've seen this happen where we want to retrofit and use some existing IP cameras because they have, you know, a problem with the NVR or they don't like the way the NVR system works retrofitting a system and using different cameras. That is definitely an option here. Now I will comment because I know I've done a lot of Unify videos. Someone's going to ask to my knowledge as of right now in July of 2019 Unify still does not support OMVIF. So there may be ways to make it work, but they're not part of the official support list. Just an FYI for those wondering. And they have more information on their site about the licensing pack. There are a couple weird cameras that are both supported such as the AXIS one that I even say weird non-traditional that may have multiple lenses. And some of those are some edge cases and they do note that those, even though it's a single camera, because the camera produces more views off of a single camera, it doesn't kind of get you around it. So they're still going to charge you for the licenses for the views. That's just one of those things I wanted to mention is in here. So let's get into what this system looks like. All right, so let's start with how do you get cameras on here? It's actually pretty simple. I have these two cameras set up already. But if you want to add the cameras, they have a really simple wizard. Add camera, it'll walk you through all the setup options, finding cameras when they're on the same network interface, generic OMVIF, and then from here it can lock onto the camera, go through the settings if their camera has some special password, because it has such a broad list of camera supports, it'll actually try a lot of the defaults and go in there. So that was really easy to add cameras. It wasn't that big of a deal at all. And because these are both supported, it was really a matter of couple clicks and they were set up. Now once you have the camera set up, let's look at the settings on them. So we're going to edit and they've got to edit or edit in batch. So if you wanted to batch perform operations and send a lot of settings to all the cameras, great that they have that. But you do have the option, of course, just to edit one camera at a time. So I'm going to go back to edit and choose, we'll edit just the real link first. So device settings, video, choose the video format you like, default stage 264. There's going to be some varied options on here based on possibly what camera you get. Audio format, if the camera supports audio, you can set the stream resolution. If it has multiple stream options, this only has one stream profile. And I set it at the highest res. We set 10 frames a second. But of course, it goes up to and it's going to vary with models of camera bit rate control variables only option and we wanted the highest image quality on this. It also has some more specific options. If you want to enable the PTZ by default, this camera, it says PTZ but this specific camera only has zoom option. But it's still what you want that feature turned on. You control it there. Then we go to record settings, pre record time, post record time, keep within last days to give you, like I said, on every individual camera or edit it in batch, you can control all the details of the camera. You can set recording schedules. How you want the streams to be handled. And it's got balanced versus high quality low bandwidth. So there's different options when they're setting the streams, disable recording and rotation or mute audio recording. Those are different options as well. So you can, ticking this option will disable the recording schedule and manual recording. So just like I said, they give you, I kind of like the amount of fine grain control you have on there. Same with the live view. How you want the live view settings balanced, high performance, low bandwidth. And if you have cameras that a group too many of them, perhaps you may want to slow down the bandwidth because maybe they're viewing it remotely. So those are some of the options on there versus you may want to keep them recording at high quality directly to the NVR for later playback. Optimization. This is kind of neat because it lets you choose by the camera settings or by the surveillance station. So you can force different things on there. And this is going to vary with camera model, how you, how this works. So you still allows you to log in when you have the camera set up. You can still log into the cameras and override certain options and let the camera do it because some of the more advanced cameras may have more intelligence within the camera that does a function that you want. So you can let the Sonali station handle all the recording, but the camera still do whatever advanced functions it may have. It does have, depending on the model camera, mirror flip and rotate, which is kind of cool. You can force reboot a camera on a schedule. I think that's kind of neat. Or force restart when camera disconnected. Event detection. Once again, this is going to be dependent on cameras. Some cameras have their own built in event detection that will detect whether or not there was a motion event or you can use the surveillance station to do it. And when you use a surveillance station to do it, you get the options of the detection area and setting it. But that varies on camera when it comes to, if you want to do that inside the camera. So a lot of the cameras do offer motion event notifications like that's built in a function of the camera and you can edit inside each camera. If it supports it, the areas that you want to sense motion, but if the camera doesn't support it, you can do that inside a surveillance station. We're going to leave it actually set by surveillance station. Nope. If there's IO module supported, that is on here as well. So you can do that. Now, the other option is we have with the PTZ. So we're going to go to BTZ control. Well, I'll show you what it looks like on a camera that only has zoom. So you can set different options. You can set up a troll whether you want to do that. And I see where the camera would just assume that would be kind of boring setting just that as an option. But you can control like the PTZ speed, how fast or how slow it will in this case, this camera only zooms that we're looking at here. So you can set it there. But let's look at a camera that has more functionality. And this allows us to set different positions. And how do we add another position? Pretty easy. Test. And then we just move the camera over. Actually going to spin around and look at me. There we go. Here I am. Look at Tom. Save. And now you've got one more position. And if you were to set up the patrol, you could set it up to go to these different positions as a patrol. I'm not the hugest fan of the patrol positions. And I only bring that up because it seems like they always will miss that event. Even if you haven't sat there like, hey, that thing was about to happen. So we usually recommend for a lot of our clients put more cameras in if they want it because patrolling is kind of, you know, it's a mixed bag, you know, you've seen it in every heist movie where they time the camera because they can see it panning around and things like that. But take that for what it's worth. It's kind of it's really cool feature that it does have it. So yeah, I this camera works pretty good for this. It does not have zoom or I could set the zoom options as well. But this one just has it and this one just has a zoom in and out. So we'll cover that more in a second. All right, so let's jump forward to the live view and look at this looks like so here's the cameras. There's the real link sitting here. Now, I can go through and hit the edit button here as well and brings up that same menu so I can adjust the camera and change its settings. So it's actually kind of convenient. Oh, I'm going to turn my sound off because it's looping back because this camera has audio when you go on the live view and open the camera specifically and click on it, it will play the sound from that. But this is what's convenient. I can go right here to the Amcrest or the real link and jump to those pre-saved ones or if you notice my arrow changes right in the browser and if I need to make a minor adjustment to the camera double clicking it makes it this full screen and then the arrow just kind of moves around so we can kind of look at the, actually this is what I see. You're seeing my view when I look at the camera. There you go. Now you're seeing my studio from the other side which is kind of cool. Now this because it doesn't have Pantute Zoom, but it does have a optical zoom. So we're going to go ahead and zoom in with this camera here. There we go. I can move it over a little because like I said this doesn't have the Pantute Zoom and you notice it's out of focus so go in a little more. Here we go and then if we go into the settings there is a focus option that comes up where I can tell the camera to refocus but it looks like it already did. It generally focuses automatically to when you're zooming in and out. It kind of loses focus for a second while it zooms. All right there it stops. Yep and now it's refocused. Now the other camera it will do a digital zoom which I thought was novel but digital zoom you're trying to get more pixels where more pixels don't exist so I'm not a huge fan of digital zoom. Now even inside of here you still have all the different options and like the Amcrest only setup or this setup or you can add options and manage all your views. Build them out which is really, it makes it easy. So if you have this type of view a six channel nine channel 81 channel 100 channel view create camera groups so you can build groups of views. It's very very flexible in terms of how you want to view it and of course having those different views and we've seen a couple of our clients that have some larger installs that was really novel seeing they built one for like their kitchen area view versus another view. This this makes it really handy when you want to go. I need to see everything that happened in this area because of an event. That's really really nice the way that you that level of customization. If you have the patrol option set up you can do those as well and put the cameras on patrol to watch something as well. So I'll close this here timeline. This is a neat feature for let's see Sunday I was here and playing with the camera so here's Tom Goofen with them but we can jump to certain events when things were going on. We were recording a Sunday morning Lancer view. We've got a great view of Tony's back of Tony's head here and it lets you see all the events on a timeline so you can see what each camera viewed. I didn't have this one on at the time I only had the one camera but it kind of lets you jump back and forth between her and I think that's a a nice way to do it for the timeline. It's not hard to figure out what happened and when it happened and of course how do we export things download the complete file download the video clip I like that you can pick this instead of having to try to figure how to edit it later which is sometimes you have to do with some camera systems you can go through and just say give me the clip from this moment to this moment because that's the interesting part of the clip so this does let you export that just the clip that you want because we don't want to watch eight minutes or ten minutes of video we want the 20 seconds of what happened and how it happened and that's it it does give you that level of customization. It also lets you seek certain moments all recording modes show events only versus show all clips so lots of customization depending on how you set the camera record up so you can replay back everything we can see what it looks like with night vision with these picture cameras like I said I'll be doing a review of these later but it will record and show you what each camera is doing and you can synchronize camera groups up so when you're doing the playback that's an option. Now it does have just to review the recordings option so it just has kind of like a raw here's the recordings here's the recordings we have for this it's recording now the Amcrush recording so pretty straightforward on that export options mount options and if you didn't know add a task to mount it actually has options to move files around and archive recordings set archive options so you can say archive these videos and if you have something else to send the archival to it does have that which is really nice for people that have to figure out how to keep stuff for certain amounts of time and figure out where to store all that data so last thing I'll talk about is the app and I thought the app was really cool on surveying the station a couple things about it one it does work if you don't have any port forwarding because you can register your Synology with the Synology quick connect and then use the quick connect to log into the app I'm using it under local IP and we did find it to be faster if you do port forwarding just FYI but let's look at the app itself so the Synology app supports the same views as you have so you can see the cameras you can look at an individual camera and it's relatively fast actually which one am I moving yep I'm moving right one it's relatively faster is like a little bit of a delay between the recording by the time it gets back to my phone here but when you're on the cameras you can also hit the pan tilt zoom option so you can move the camera around and get it to that proper position that you're looking for and this is definitely really I like this a lot for especially for if you want to set up a surveillance system at your house that's really cool you can still get notifications review the recordings set up options and things like that's a lot of customization you can do in here and one more feature that is specific to the app being on your phone is home mode and what home mode does and we're going to talk about geo fencing which is showing my shop right now because that's where I'm at so we can set the radius of home mode and what this can do is you can customize the functionality of the system to say when I'm home I don't need notifications because it's going to notify me that I'm home but then as soon as you leave it automatically goes that phone that has the app is not there anymore so now we need to turn on notifications because you're not home this is it can be time to do this obviously in the customization schedule you can time it to do different things but this way allows it to do a automated system for you and once again it doesn't require Synology to do this it requires you in the phone and home mode and as I say Synology to do this I see Synology as in you're not sending all your data to them you're not doing something that requires some cloud-enabled thing the app is talking to this Synology device that is something I like about this whole surveillance system in general is some of them are too cloud-enabled for the home and I you know we've seen times and there's a couple companies got in trouble for having all of your recordings and letting too many people see them that makes you a little nervous this is all self-contained it doesn't need to go out to the internet to send a bunch of data Synology it's not sending your recordings to Synology at all it's all stored locally here but you know combine this with the app I think you got a really great tool and in terms of documentation including specifically like this home mode and how it works Synology's done a great job with documentation so you can do a little bit of searching and their Synology support center has a ton of different everything from help topics to tutorials of how to set and configure a lot of this stuff up we have found them to be very intuitive I've not really found myself going into the support at all and I do want to dig into some of the more features that this offers and maybe I'll do that in a later video because there are a few things that I want to try out like time-lapse mode and some other things it might be really cool to have so my overall impressions is we really like this device we've got clients using it I'm going to be doing some deployment follow-up videos for systems that we've got deployed and how we have them set up and what cameras we use I will be reviewing these cameras separately but I'll leave links to them they're not bad but I'm going to show you when I do the review like their overall performance in a couple different situations including their night performance, day performance and get into the details and we'll be using them here on the Subhalency State Synology Surveillance Station like I said I'll leave links below to where you can get all this fun stuff they are some affiliate links so they do help out the channel if you want to purchase them through that check out the Synology NVR Finder and camera lists to see if maybe existing cameras you have are already supported by this but it's the list like I said with 71,000 cameras on the list there's a lot of supported cameras on there so it's very likely that if you've had cameras made in the last few years that they're supported and there are ways that you can adapt like older style cameras to this with different devices that do recording such as VivoTek system and this will take those BNC style cameras and adapt them to IP but please note that if you get something like this because it's bringing in eight camera streams it does require eight licenses because there are eight cameras on there but either way it's an option if you want to retrofit existing systems we have a client that was asking about this because they have some cameras that are not bad even though they're older BNC and they don't want to rip and replace everything they'd like to get a system that can still record on some of those cameras until they get around to upgrading them and once again Sonology makes it easy to support a mix mode of cameras where you have these older cameras that are existing you get some newer nicer cameras or even some really high-end cameras and mix and mode whatever you want because well there's a lot of options out there and there's a lot of scenarios when you try to look at how you're going to plan out your surveillance system you want to make sure you have a system that supports all of it so I guess it huge thumbs up on this device the clients have been running it for a while are happy the new deployments that we've done recently our clients have been ecstatic about it it's really brought them a good visibility into some of the venues that they wanted to keep an eye on and I guess I'll be doing a video about the planning and deployment we did for a recent client all right thanks thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe youtube will send you a 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