Synology Surveillance Station

steve hollis · Sep 24, 2018

So after struggling with Synology and their surveillance station for more than a few years, we had an incident outside our house and having all the family round, they all turned to me and said Look at your CCTV. Imagine my embarrassment when I couldn’t find the clip we needed and when i did, it was the wrong one. The DS Cam app on my phone and iPad lagged behind as well being so slow.

So for the cctv side of things, I decided to junk Synology and invest in a Dahua NVR5216-16P-4KS2E.

And boy what a difference. Obviously something that’s dedicated will be better anyway, but with a bit of practise, you can find pretty much any clip instantly and it’s in a totally different league.

So my message is for Synology surveillance station users is go with NVR or DVR instead, I can’t recommend ithem enough.

weigle2 · Sep 25, 2018

Well said. Dahua NVR's just work and are extremely reliable. I thought about using the Synology approach 2 years ago, but the stupid licensing fees were pretty high. For the number of cameras I have, it came out the same cost wise for an NVR and 2 HD's. And, why waste all that disk space in a NAS to recording when it will just be deleted anyway, after a short period of time. An NVR also has HDMI output(s) for viewing all you camera's, which can be extended via Ethernet to an available HDMI port on a TV. That's very handy when you hear a 'noise'.

mark_whocares · Sep 28, 2018

Yeah the surveillance station isn't exactly awesome.

the per cam licensing fees is pretty high for the buggy software that is surveillance station. I keep two of my cameras streaming to it in addition to the other setup cuz, but I wouldn't recommend it to others over many of the other offerings out there.

what model Synology did you all have ? I have a 916+ full at 4 drives and while i'm not a fan of it for IPCam things, the DS video app on a phone isn't "that" slow to locate and play back. it slays mobile devices battery pushing H265 to em, but I wouldn't say it took more than 1/4 of second to jump to a point in time and start playing back.

looney2ns · Sep 29, 2018

A $200 pc running Blue Iris will run circles around a nas or nvr.

J Sigmo · Sep 29, 2018

I looked at the Synology approach when I was first getting started with all of this, but as others have stated, the licensing fees based on a per-camera model put that idea out of my head quickly enough. Reading this makes me even more happy that I went with BI on a dedicated PC instead.

mjessup44 · Oct 3, 2018

I have the Synology Surveillance Station running on a NAS I bought a year before deciding to set up a security cam system and decided to use it. It honestly works fine but in the planning process for new house and will not use it again due to the poor mobile apps, slow live view (cpu intensive laptop can barely handle it). 9 cams current running on it with no problems at all

mark_whocares · Oct 4, 2018

I think there is a wide array of what is fine to some people isn't to others.

there are a wide arrays of Synology's out there. some have more powerful cpus than others, some are a small number of drives, some are a larger number of drives.

I will say that for me it's been disappointing to see the H.265 support is lacking, often turning it on breaks activation of a cam in it and it loops over and over on it. cams configurations often break after updating SS. alerts are sub par. geo fencing often fails to work as expected. mobile apps for SS are getting better but were crash happy for a long time.

the most recent / latest update broke the hell out of 'smart search' on historical searches for me on all cams.we stopped caring as much since i've moved on at home and at work we moved on to something else as well.

the cam licensing is not cost competitive when compared with others. the feature set also is not so good that it should command the ~50 USD per cam fees they want.

general notes on synology.

Buying a Synology is buying a very wide swamp/pond, in that it's a mile wide and an inch deep. it will do a lot of different things - but few of them are done that well. things are a lot better if you have one that is new enough it can just run docker containers on it. then you just drop containers in to do something well, not half way.

their customer support is also sub par, IMO. we bought several at work (to basically do a station wagon full of drives rolling down the highway) to move a few PiB of data about 4 years ago between some data centers in a weekend. (think 12 bay models) configured out with 10G cards ..etc ..etc ..etc. performance never met the their advertised specs. getting a hold of their support wasn't fun, keeping them engaged in problems wasn't fun, ran into lots of known bugs with no expectations on when it might get fixed ..etc.

my 2cents on Synology. granted we'd used others like qnap at other jobs i've had, end of they day they all seem to do a lot of different tasks, but none of them do a lot of tasks really well. maybe that will improve now they are getting use VMs / Docker containers..etc ..etc ..etc because you will be less beholden to Syno, QNap , or whatever NAS maker to fix their code.

mjessup44 · Oct 6, 2018

mark_whocares said:
I think there is a wide array of what is fine to some people isn't to others.

there are a wide arrays of Synology's out there. some have more powerful cpus than others, some are a small number of drives, some are a larger number of drives.

I will say that for me it's been disappointing to see the H.265 support is lacking, often turning it on breaks activation of a cam in it and it loops over and over on it. cams configurations often break after updating SS. alerts are sub par. geo fencing often fails to work as expected. mobile apps for SS are getting better but were crash happy for a long time.

the most recent / latest update broke the hell out of 'smart search' on historical searches for me on all cams.we stopped caring as much since i've moved on at home and at work we moved on to something else as well.

the cam licensing is not cost competitive when compared with others. the feature set also is not so good that it should command the ~50 USD per cam fees they want.

general notes on synology.

Buying a Synology is buying a very wide swamp/pond, in that it's a mile wide and an inch deep. it will do a lot of different things - but few of them are done that well. things are a lot better if you have one that is new enough it can just run docker containers on it. then you just drop containers in to do something well, not half way.

their customer support is also sub par, IMO. we bought several at work (to basically do a station wagon full of drives rolling down the highway) to move a few PiB of data about 4 years ago between some data centers in a weekend. (think 12 bay models) configured out with 10G cards ..etc ..etc ..etc. performance never met the their advertised specs. getting a hold of their support wasn't fun, keeping them engaged in problems wasn't fun, ran into lots of known bugs with no expectations on when it might get fixed ..etc.

my 2cents on Synology. granted we'd used others like qnap at other jobs i've had, end of they day they all seem to do a lot of different tasks, but none of them do a lot of tasks really well. maybe that will improve now they are getting use VMs / Docker containers..etc ..etc ..etc because you will be less beholden to Syno, QNap , or whatever NAS maker to fix their code.

From an owner of a Synology NAS I agree with this completely I had the CPU fail (apparently intel made bad cpu's that would fail eventually) I got a new Synology sent to me as long as I returned my old one within 30 days (had to give credit card info that was charged $800 then was refunded once they got my old nas) I also used to use there survalience system and it was the fact that it was supported on the new NAS I bought that got me into IP cam's I had 9 cam's setup and it worked fine but of course a year later I learned about blue iris and it is so much better but the Synology was good enough.

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Synology Surveillance Station

steve hollis

Young grasshopper

weigle2

mark_whocares

Getting comfortable

looney2ns

J Sigmo

Known around here

mjessup44

n3wb

mark_whocares

Getting comfortable

mjessup44

n3wb