Unifi / HikVision NVR with Private PoE Cameras

[VR6Pete]

Hi folks,

long story short, I have a Unifi UDM SE and HIKVision NVR - on a 192.168.86.* range.

Unifi now support adopting other onvif cameras into Unifi Protect, but long story short is that you cannot proxy through the NVR and instead each camera needs to be on the same LAN as the UDM SE, which of course with my cameras being connected via the PoE ports on the NVR forms part of a private network on internal/private 192.168.254.* range.

I tried using the configuration to manually adopt the camera in unifi protect using the http://<nvr-ip>:65001 for example (which I can can access via browser fine as using VirtualHost), but unifi protect doesn't adopt the camera properly.

Unifi support state the camera should be on the same network as the the UDM SE, of course the cameras are powered by PoE from the NVR.

Can anyone make any suggestions on possible ways of exposing the cameras via the NVR - or if I am missing a trick somewhere.

Seems crazy that for the most OOTB configuration this does not work.

Thanks.

Pete

 

[Gin]

[UPDATE] I found a solution. See below.


I have HikVision cameras on VLAN ID #3. I can confirm that they are reachable from my browser, and can view the video stream with VLC, but I can't get Unifi Protect to find them. Also tried advanced adoption (from clicking their question mark in upper right of devices screen) but this failed too saying:

I don't know what Unifi means by "same network". I don't see any place to tell Protect which network to use. Do you think it just uses the default VLAN #1 network?

I would be interested if anyone has any suggestions of how to get Unifi to connect to these cameras.




SOLUTION:

Go to HikVision camera settings. Select Network | Advanced settings | Integration protocol. Check Enable ONVIF (mine was not previously checked). Then below in the User List, click Add and add a user and credentials (before I didn't have any users in this list). It's still unclear to me which Level to select. For now I chose Media user.





Now go to Unifi Protect | Unifi Devices. Again no devices were showing. So I clicked the question mark icon in the upper right corner, with the fly out that says, "Can't find your devices?" You'll get this dialog:



Click the last link, "try advanced adoption". Enter the camera's IP address and username and password, and now it finally found my camera!!!

Hope this works for you.