Synology Surveillance Station as a BI alternative

[dougri]

Maybe this will be useful information since the question of Synology Surveillance Station vs Blue Iris comes up time to time. I've been going back and forth with Synology Sales & Support while considering a new Synology NAS to do double duty using Surveillance Station.

I, like others (I think), believed that a Synology NAS using Surveillance Station acted in the same manner as Blue Iris on a dedicated PC, but with lesser performance and features. My presumption was that is was a simple, low-cost alternative to BI for those needing/wanting to buy or upgrade their NAS anyway.

However, what I learned through a series of discussions with support is that Surveillance Station only writes the streams to disk (much like direct-to-disk for BI), but that the "live-view" feature used to monitor cameras in a matrix via a browser plugin gives the lions share of the load to the client device/PC. Worse, the existing live view plugin does NOT use hardware acceleration for decoding. Thus, the system requirments for using Surveillance Station to monitor & review (rather than just record) may exceed those for a dedicated BI setup with any system of more than just a few high-MP ipCams. There is even an FAQ discussing the system requirements for live-view that sales directed me to after some back-and-forth:
Surveillance Station - Knowledge Base | Synology Inc.

The system requirements in the chart are for a high number of low-MP cameras at 85% CPU load... this seems to be the typical Surveillance Station intended customer (lots of cameras recording to multiple NAS being viewed on multiple dedicated PCs running live view on IE with their Surveillance plugin)... a very enterprise solution. As far as performance of the live-view plugin...
"We are releasing a desktop client in the future (it's in beta now) that will offer better performance. Further into the future we are aiming for GPU acceleration for the desktop client as well."

Not even sure they're considering quick-sync use???

Having said all that, I'm not sure I see any advantage of Surveillance Station over BI for the typical home/small business system given the feature disparity and lack of any cost/simplicity advantage. And having said that, I still DO like my existing Synology NAS, but am no longer considering a much nicer one as an alternative to a dedicated BI PC.

 

[cyberwolf_uk]

Hi dougri,

Speaking from personal experience of using both BI and SS, I couldn't recommend BI enough and would do to anyone that is willing to listen. Whilst I'm a great supporter of Synology's NAS products (I personally own two) and their packages their surveillance centre is so far behind BI, I personally don't think they are worthy of comparison. If anyone can find a software based surveillance package with so many features and is better than BI (per price) then let me know so I can switch!
SS give you two free licences then you pay I believe it's about $50 per camera! As whereby BI is about $70 for the product and that's it!

For me SS is used as a 24/7 recording system (hidden in a Bat Cave for backup) and that's it, luckily Synology gave me a 4 extra licence activation pack My BI system is the brains of my security system in conduction with other things
If anybody already has a Synology NAS and only has two or less cameras and simply wants 24/7 recording then go for it.

 

[dougri]

Hi dougri,

Speaking from personal experience of using both BI and SS, I couldn't recommend BI enough and would do to anyone that is willing to listen. Whilst I'm a great supporter of Synology's NAS products (I personally own two) and their packages their surveillance centre is so far behind BI, I personally don't think they are worthy of comparison. If anyone can find a software based surveillance package with so many features and is better than BI (per price) then let me know so I can switch!
SS give you two free licences then you pay I believe it's about $50 per camera! As whereby BI is about $70 for the product and that's it!

For me SS is used as a 24/7 recording system (hidden in a Bat Cave for backup) and that's it, luckily Synology gave me a 4 extra licence activation pack My BI system is the brains of my security system in conduction with other things
If anybody already has a Synology NAS and only has two or less cameras and simply wants 24/7 recording then go for it.

Yup... think it's fine for recording only duties... most people considering BI are looking for more though. Like you though, think their Disk Stations are great NASs.

 

[cyberwolf_uk]

Yup... think it's fine for recording only duties... most people considering BI are looking for more though. Like you though, think their Disk Stations are great NASs.

When you say "Most people considering BI and looking for more" what more do they want? (Out of curiosity)

 

[dougri]

When you say "Most people considering BI and looking for more" what more do they want? (Out of curiosity)

The ability to monitor multiple streams live with good motion, the ability employ more sophisticated motion triggering, smooth scanning of clips and timelines, etc. You can do most of this with SS, but it will require a computer with as much or more horsepower than a BI PC. So, given license cost, anything more than 2 cameras and it is hard to justify SS over BI.

 

[rnatalli]

SS works fine as a basic solution, but BI is much, much better overall. The mobile app alone is worth it.

 

[jtsull]

I had a low end SS NAS and the CPU would max out with two 3mp cameras. Then bought a fairly fast synology NAS with SS and that worked OK regarding the CPU load however Synology is constantly updating the software and mobile app (which is good) but many times the app or program stopped working because of an issue with the update. Then you wait for a couple days and they send out a new update that fixes the previous update. Got frustrated, built a nice fast server for blue iris and now run 6 cameras flawlessly. Mobile app cost a little bit of $ but worth it. IMHO BI is great!

 

[rnatalli]

Just to throw a few alternatives out there. You can check out Netcam Studio on PC as it has decent features, good mobile app, and is simple to use. Milestone XProtect is another PC product with good features, but it's a huge program and difficult to use IMO. On the Mac side, SecuritySpy is pretty good. All these would be better picks than SS IMO, but with all that said, BI still remains the standard for me.