Hey
@rpmartinez I see you DM'd me as well so thought I would answer here in efforts to help others. Tagging
@EMPIRETECANDY for awareness too.
I run a full Unifi infrastructure (as well as others) as part of multiple setups I have in place. This includes Protect architecture for testing as well. The AI Port was certainly an interesting device when announced but there are a number of shortcomings to it that many are not aware of, the main being cost when scaling as well as capabilities.
While at point of announce this sounded like a very cool device that would allow most to move residential, small business or even commercial deployments into UI’s surveillance middleware, once released it was / is clear that their sole intention is to support 1 or 2 cams while instead you look to purchase their cams for your deployment. The downside there is that while UI cams have certainly come on in their design and feature support, they still do not hold a candle to pro camera manufacturers like Dahua, Hikvision, Axis etc.
So what are the shortcomings, pitfalls that I talk about. Let me list those below:
- Cost. At $199 each and with limited camera support per AI Port (both now and in the future), this gets expensive, fast. Let me rundown some typical deployments with numbers:
- 2K / 4 MP Camera Deployments First:
- 8 x 2K (4MP) cameras would require 4 x AI Ports (once the AI Port finally supports 2 x 2K cameras in future update) at a cost of $199 each for a total of $800
- 16 x 2K (4MP) cameras would require 8 x AI Ports (once the AI Port finally supports 2 x 2K cameras in future update) at a cost of $199 each for a total of $1600
- 4K / 8 MP Camera Deployments First:
- 8 x 4K (8MP) cameras would require 8 x AI Ports (only 1 x 4K camera is and will be supported per AI Port) at a cost of $199 each for a total of $1600
- 16 x 4K (8MP) cameras would require 8 x AI Ports (only 1 x 4K camera is and will be supported per AI Port) at a cost of $199 each for a total of $3200
IF you can get past the cost of how these scale for your deployment there are the other limiting factors:
- AI Port has limited support for number of cameras based on resolution of the camera itself + firmware support of AI Port.
- Multisensor cameras with very wide aspect ratios are not compatible (180 degree cams etc are / will not be supported)
- The AI Port supports resolutions up to 4K (3840 x 2160) and 30 FPS.
- Currently limited to 1 ONVIF camera per AI port.
- In time, UI is promising to expand to multi-camera support per AI port but with the following limitations:
- ONVIF 4K: Only 1 camera
- ONVIF 2K: Up to 2 cameras
- ONVIF HD: Up to 3 cameras
- Unifi Protect Cameras: Up to 5 cameras (no limit mentioned on what each camera resolution needs to be limited to but MIGHT be 4K on UI cams only)
In my opinion and experience there are MUCH better (and cheaper) options out there including Dahua's own AI NVR's or roll your own surveillance NVR using a VM + Frigate or
Blue Iris or Milestone etc, for a fraction of the cost.
Hope that helps you and others. Let me know with any questions