{"id":1200,"date":"2021-04-21T11:28:06","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T15:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/?p=1200"},"modified":"2024-03-29T09:58:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T13:58:03","slug":"post-1200","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/post-1200\/","title":{"rendered":"TOP 3 AI Person Detection NVR Camera Systems &#8211; UniFi Protect vs Blue Iris vs Reolink RLK8-810B4-A"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZOAm8YZSRa4\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Reolink vs Protect vs Blue Iris<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Today on the hookup we\u2019re going to do a head to head showdown pitting the three of the most popular wired security camera systems with AI person and vehicle against each other. I\u2019ll give you an in depth look at UniFi Protect, Reolink\u2019s RLK8 NVR and Blue Iris with Deep Stack AI, and we\u2019ll figure out if paying 5 times the price for the UniFi system, gets you 5 times the performance.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>Current security camera tech is absolutely crazy compared to 10 years ago.\u00a0 Not only has the resolution, sharpness, and light sensitivity increased dramatically, but even more importantly we now have affordable on device computer vision that can do AI person and vehicle detection to drastically reduce false motion alerts.\u00a0 A \u201cSecurity camera lite\u201d experience is available with battery powered wifi cameras from companies like Eufy and Ring, but for real security applications there\u2019s no replacement for wired security cameras and 24\/7 recording.<\/p>\n<p>Today we\u2019re going to compare three of the most popular wired camera solutions to see which one has the best AI Detection, Ease of Setup, User Interface, image quality, and reliability and hopefully figure out which one best fits your use case.<\/p>\n<p>These three systems can vary significantly in price depending on your desired camera resolution and number of cameras, but to standardize prices I\u2019m going to build out each system for 4x 4K resolution cameras and a 2 terabyte hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>The least expensive system in today\u2019s video is the reolink RLK8-810B4-A package that gets you a standalone network video recorder with a pre-installed 2 terabyte hard drive and 4 Reolink RL-810A 4K bullet cameras. \u00a0The package also includes 4 60 foot ethernet cables, which may or may not be long enough to reach where you want to install your cameras, if not, any standard ethernet cable will work for connecting your cameras. \u00a0The NVR itself provides power over ethernet for each camera so you won\u2019t need to run an additional power cable or purchase a PoE switch.\u00a0 This system works with the Reolink mobile app, Reolink Desktop App, or web interface and as I mentioned before, includes AI person and vehicle detection for accurate and reliable notifications.\u00a0 The Reolink package has an MSRP of $559 but can frequently be found on sale for less than $475.<\/p>\n<p>The next system is a bit more difficult to put a total price on because there are so many different ways to build out the system.\u00a0 Blue Iris is software that runs on a windows computer, so if you already have a 6<sup>th<\/sup> generation intel system available, you may be able to just run blue iris on that, but for the purpose of this video I\u2019m going to assume that you will be purchasing everything fresh.\u00a0 I run my blue iris server on a 6<sup>th<\/sup> generation i7 dell optiplex.<\/p>\n<p>Mine was a hand me down from a friend, but they can be found on ebay for around $350 with windows 10 preinstalled.\u00a0 When selecting a system to run blue iris you shouldn\u2019t get any processor older than Intel\u2019s \u201cskylake\u201d series, which is sometimes called 6<sup>th<\/sup> generation and has model numbers like 6700.<\/p>\n<p>Skylake was the first intel chip to support hardware accelerated decoding of the H265 video codec, which basically means that you can run a lot more 4K cameras without maxing out your processor.\u00a0 8 gigs of ram is fine, but 16 is better, and if you can find something with a solid state hard drive you should go for it since you\u2019ll want to get a separate hard drive for your camera footage anyways.\u00a0 Speaking of, add another $60 for a 2 terabyte hard drive to match the Reolink\u2019s specs and a license for blue iris which is $69.<\/p>\n<p>So for the NVR Portion of this build we\u2019re looking at $479 before adding cameras.\u00a0 However, adding cameras is the strong point of this build.\u00a0 We can add almost any camera we want to blue iris as long as it is ONVIF Compliant.\u00a0 Unlike the reolink NVR that requires reolink cameras, or the UniFi Protect system that uses only unifi cameras, we can get the exact cameras that we want for our setup.\u00a0 For comparison purposes I\u2019m going to say that we\u2019ll use 4 annke C800 4K turret cameras, which are about $75 each,\u00a0 You\u2019ll also need a power over ethernet switch to get data and power to those cameras, so we\u2019ll throw in an 8 port switch for $59 and we\u2019re at $838 not including ethernet cables.\u00a0 If you think that seems a lot, stay tuned.<\/p>\n<p>The UniFi protect system can run on either the standalone UNVR, cloud key Gen2+ or UniFi Dream machine Pro.\u00a0 The dream machine pro is probably the most common way that people are going to use UniFi protect because it also doubles as your network controller, router, firewall and 8 port non PoE switch.\u00a0 The dream machine pro will run you $379 without a hard drive, so we\u2019ll add the same $60 surveillance grade hard drive as before and we\u2019re up to $439 for the NVR portion of this build.<\/p>\n<p>Next are the cameras\u2026 UniFi protect only works with UniFi cameras and UniFi\u2019s AI Person and vehicle detection only works with their G4 series of cameras, so to get a 4K cameras the only one that fits the bill is the UniFi G4 Pro, a 4K resolution bullet camera with AI detection.\u00a0 Each G4 Pro will cost you $449, and they also need to be powered by a PoE switch.\u00a0 If you\u2019re going UniFi you should get a UniFi switch, so throw in an 8 port 150 watt switch for $199 and that will bring this build to a grand total of to a total of $2434 for a 4 camera system.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll talk a little more about this configuration at the end of the video, but if you\u2019re going to spend this kind of money on your security cameras, you should probably get the standalone UNVR instead of running UniFi protect on your Dream Machine Pro.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessary to declare a \u201cwinner\u201d in this category, but you can see that the Reolink system is half the cost of the Blue Iris system, and UniFi Protect is over 5 times the price.\u00a0 Of course the UniFi system also gets you a router, firewall, and switch and the Blue iris system is an entire PC that can run extra services like home assistant, and plex, while the Reolink solution is just for cameras.<\/p>\n<p>Next lets talk about setup.\u00a0 The unavoidable pain with any wired camera setup will be getting the ethernet cables run from a centralized location to where you want to put your cameras.\u00a0 In this case, all of the systems are the same, and there\u2019s no getting around it, if you\u2019re serious about security, your cameras need to be wired.\u00a0 If this is the part that is holding you up, there are plenty of contractors that can be hired to install your ethernet drops for you, just search for low voltage wiring contractors in your area.\u00a0 However, once you get those wired installed there is still quite a bit of variability in the ease of of each of these systems.<\/p>\n<p>The Reolink NVR is by far the easiest, you just plug each of the cameras into the ports on the back of the NVR, connect the network port to your router or switch and power it on.\u00a0 If your NVR is on the same network as your phone the Reolink app will discover it automatically and guide you through the rest of the setup.\u00a0 There isn\u2019t a whole lot of customization other than setting the resolution and motion detection for your cameras if you want to change them from the defaults.\u00a0 Overall the setup process of the reolink NVR should take less than 10 minutes after your cameras are mounted and your wires are run.<\/p>\n<p>Next in the ease of setup category would be the UniFi protect cameras.\u00a0 Once you\u2019ve got your network setup and your cameras plugged into the correct PoE enabled ports on your switches you can open up your unifi controller and the cameras will automatically ask to be adopted into your UniFi protect system.\u00a0 Once in UniFi protect you can configure each camera\u2019s picture to be to your liking, but like the Reolink NVR there aren\u2019t a whole lot of options that need to be messed with during setup, it all just kinda works.\u00a0\u00a0 You can also download the UniFi protect app, and if you have cloud management enabled your cameras will be added automatically once you sign in.\u00a0 Without the cloud, the UniFi protect app is mostly useless, more on that later.<\/p>\n<p>Easily coming in last when it comes to ease of setup is the Blue Iris NVR software.\u00a0 I made a whole video about a year ago showing how to setup blue iris cameras and get them working with Deepstack AI software for computer vision, but compared to Reolink and UniFi you will need to be comfortable with tinkering around in advanced settings menus, and your setup will be different based on which brand of camera you decide to use.\u00a0 I\u2019m excited to say that Blue Iris has just recently released native deepstack AI integration which significantly simplifies the setup process, but I still wouldn\u2019t call it easy.\u00a0 In this video I\u2019ll share the pros and cons of the native integration vs the original solution using AI tool, and my next video will be a detailed setup of blue iris from scratch.\u00a0 I was tempted to make the setup video this week but I wanted to give the blue iris developers some time to tweak the implementation, which has already had at least 3 updates since release, before I make a full setup video.<\/p>\n<p>So far we\u2019ve figured out that the reolink system has all the same features, is comparatively very inexpensive and is the easiest to setup, so the big question is how well does it work.\u00a0 For this test I setup each of the three systems with a camera showing the exact same viewing area.\u00a0 I setup person and vehicle only alerts and then combed through the 24 hours of footage for each camera noting in my excel file the timestamp when a person or vehicle was detected.\u00a0 If a camera missed a detection I marked a miss, and if it gave a false or late detection I marked those as well.<\/p>\n<p>For the 24 hour testing period there were a total of 178 positive motion events.\u00a0 The Blue iris system came out on top detecting over 91.5% of events accurately with 1 false motion alert and 14 events that were caught by one of the other cameras, but were not recorded in blue iris.<\/p>\n<p>Next with a respectable 86.5% accuracy was the UniFi protect system.\u00a0 Out of those 178 possible events UniFi protect had 1 false motion alert and 23 misses.\u00a0 Slightly concerning was the fact that out of those 23 misses, a significant number of them were people and not vehicles\u2026 Out of the 34 people that walked through the area in a 24 hour period, blue iris missed 3 of them, unifi protect missed 6 of them and the reolink NVR missed 9.<\/p>\n<p>The reolink had the lowest overall accuracy at just 77% with a total of 41 misses, but no false positives.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to be able to do further analysis of why UniFi protect and the Reolink NVR missed specific motion events, but unlike the blue iris AI tool there\u2019s no way to go back and figure out why an AI detection event was missed.<\/p>\n<p>In this category blue iris and deep stack come out on top, followed by unifi protect, and last in terms of AI detection reliability and accuracy was the reolink NVR.<\/p>\n<p>Now that we\u2019ve talked about AI detection, we need to address the elephant in the room.\u00a0 When considering the Reolink or UniFi protect system it\u2019s important to also look at the camera quality, since the Reolink NVR only works with Reolink Cameras, and the UniFi NVR only works with UniFi cameras.\u00a0 The AI detection specifically only applies to Reolink model number that end in A, while AI detection is only available on UniFi\u2019s G4 series of cameras.<\/p>\n<p>To compare the two systems lets take a look at some clips from the UniFi G4 Pro and the Reolink RLC-810A.\u00a0 Keep in mind that the Reolink RLC-810A has an MSRP of $85 compared to the $449 MSRP of the UniFi G4 Pro.\u00a0 Even so, in my tests the Reolink RLC-810A consistently produced a clearer and crisper image than the G4 Pro during the day.\u00a0 Still images had significantly better edges and contrast, and moving images had less interframe tearing.\u00a0 At night the G4 Pro is noticeably better than the RLC-810A which had less contrast and is still experiencing the same night time ghosting and low frame rate issues I noticed during my initial review of it.<\/p>\n<p>While I did have both of the cameras dialed in so that their field of view was nearly identical, the G4 Pro does have the added benefit of a 3x motorized optical zoom.\u00a0 If that\u2019s something you really need Reolink\u2019s RLC-811A is about to come out which has 4x motorized optical zoom, white and infrared LEDs, a built in siren, and two way audio, for a quarter of the price of the G4 pro.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no reason to talk about cameras when looking at Blue Iris because you can basically use any camera you want, including the RLC-810A and G4 Pro.\u00a0 Any camera listed as ONVIF compatible will work with blue iris.<\/p>\n<p>So for camera selection and quality blue iris is the clear winner, followed by reolink which has quite a few compatible cameras at reasonable prices and last is definitely unifi which has a limited selection of very expensive cameras with mediocre performance\u2026 and right now you couldn\u2019t even buy them if you wanted because they are all out of stock.<\/p>\n<p>Next, lets talk about the three basic use cases of security cameras: The first is live viewing which lets you see what\u2019s happing on your property in real time.\u00a0 Second, if you know when an event occurred you can access footage from that specific time and export clips for law enforcement, and third you can just browse through the events of the day, which is probably not something that most people will be doing, but it\u2019s not out of the question.<\/p>\n<p>For live viewing the Reolink NVR offers the most options.\u00a0 You can view your cameras in the mobile app, the windows app, a web browser or by using the HDMI port on the back of the NVR to hook directly to a tv or monitor.<\/p>\n<p>The UniFi protect live view can be viewed in a web browser or in the UniFi protect mobile app.\u00a0 UniFi also sells a product called the viewport for $199 that gives you a way to hook a monitor directly to your UniFi protect live view through HDMI, but you won\u2019t be able to do it with just your dream machine pro or even the standalone UNVR.<\/p>\n<p>Blue Iris live view is available in the blue iris windows app, the browser based UI3 interface, or the Blue Iris mobile app, which does cost an additional $10 on top of $69 blue iris windows software.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve heard some reports of the Reolink system lagging behind in the live view, so I ran a test where I kept the live view of each camera open for 24 hours and the results were surprising.\u00a0 Not only did the Reolink not experience any kind of delay compared to blue iris, but UniFi protect was by far the worst in this category.\u00a0 Not only did UniFi protect automatically log me out every 4-5 hours, but it also had the largest delay out of all the cameras which was about 2 seconds of total lag time.<\/p>\n<p>In my mind all these systems perform just about the same when it comes to live view, with the reolink having a slight edge by offering a direct HDMI connection and the UniFi protect system slightly lower than blue iris due to the larger delay and inability to stay logged in to the web interface.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to finding, reviewing an exporting a clip from a specific time or event, that\u2019s where all of these wired systems shine.\u00a0 Speaking from experience, it is a terrible feeling when a neighbor comes to you asking if you got any footage before or after a crime and you have to tell them that nothing was recorded.\u00a0 Thankfully, all of these systems can be setup to record 24\/7, while flagging motion events.\u00a0 In the reolink system every camera records both a low resolution and high resolution stream 24 hours a day 7 days a week.\u00a0 The downside to that method is obviously that you are going to eat through hard drive space really quickly, and not just space, most hard drives are not made for that kind of constant write duty, and may fail prematurely after recording that much data constantly. Similar issues may arise with UniFi protect that records the high resolution stream 24\/7 and sets a motion flag for any events.\u00a0 Blue iris can be setup to record basically any way you want, but I have mine set up to record in low resolution 24\/7, but switch to 4K resolution whenever there is confirmed motion with a vehicle or person.\u00a0 This way if a critical motion event is missed I can always go back and at least access the low resolution footage, but it significantly increases the amount of footage that I can store before the hard drive fills up and also extends the life of that hard drive by reducing the read write cycles significantly.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to actually exporting the clips, the Blue Iris system works the best in most cases.\u00a0 When exporting a clip in the blue iris PC software you select a clip, then drag the crop icons to the beginning and end of your desired clip, right click, and choose export.\u00a0 You can select different export qualities and methods and as usual the blue iris interface offers you so much customization that it can be overwhelming.\u00a0 The good news is that if you just leave everything on the default for the export0 profile you will end up with a good result.\u00a0 I usually export my clips directly from the blue iris web interface since my main blue iris program runs in the background on my home server.\u00a0 In the web interface the process is similar where you select a clip, then choose export and drag the start and end icons to where you want them.\u00a0 The preview shows you the current position of those clip markers which makes the whole process really simple.<\/p>\n<p>The UniFi protect system is similar and you have a few options, you can either download entire clips from the events window, or from the timeline interface you can select beginning and end points and export a clip.\u00a0 Unfortunately, in my testing the clip selection is buggy and it\u2019s definitely not as easy to find the beginning and end of your clip as it is in blue iris, but it does have the advantage of being able to string together multiple consecutive motion events into a single export which makes sense because it\u2019s actually just recording 24\/7.\u00a0 The UniFi protect mobile app has similar functionality allowing you to not only download entire motion events, but also make custom clips.<\/p>\n<p>From the desktop app of the reolink NVR you can only download entire video files so you are stuck downloading an hour of video any time you want to grab a single event.\u00a0 Using the web interface you can download clips of up to 5 minutes, but there\u2019s no good way to preview the start and end points and you just have to kind of blindly select a range and hope that got the clip you needed. \u00a0Even worse, the only way to filter your videos based on AI person and vehicle detection is to use the Reolink mobile app, which does work great, but I\u2019d really like to see the reolink time develop their web interface and PC app significantly more to get it up to the level of the mobile app.<\/p>\n<p>The last less typical use case for security systems is someone who may want to comb through all the person and vehicle detections each day.\u00a0 I typically don\u2019t do this and instead rely on my home automation system to alert me when people are detected in strange places at strange times, but I can see where it may be useful for remote locations where there aren\u2019t normally a lot of daily events.<\/p>\n<p>For this use case the UniFi protect system has the best layout where you can quickly see the smart detections from any of the G4 series of cameras right from the landing page of the NVR web interface.\u00a0 You can also filter the smart detections by just people, just cars, or both.\u00a0 The smart detections screen goes one step further by giving you a zoomed in thumbnail of whatever it detected, so you can see the faces of people and the type of car without having to actually watch the video clip.\u00a0 This feature, which was just added to unifi protect a few months ago, was executed perfectly and is the best part of the UniFi protect system.<\/p>\n<p>As I mentioned before Blue Iris recently added direct integration of deepstack AI detection, and as of right now I\u2019m running some cameras with the new system, some with the old, and some with both for comparison purposes.\u00a0 In the old system using AI tool there was no way of filtering alerts on your phone or via web browser, but you did get a very powerful browsing experience with filters and details in the actual AI tool software.<\/p>\n<p>The new direct deepstack integration shows what kind of object was detected and the confidence of that detection right in the clip description on the PC app and web interface but it\u2019s not available in the mobile app yet.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing mobile app updates and features like filtering by object type and confidence level will be coming very soon to the native deepstack integration of blue iris. Again, I\u2019ll be doing a full setup video on that next week, but I wanted to give the blue iris developers a little time to get thing ironed out first.<\/p>\n<p>Last in this catagory, the reolink AI person and vehicle detection is ONLY available in the mobile app for some reason.\u00a0 You can filter by all AI based events, just people or just vehicles, but you have to click on each event to see what it actually was and there is no preview like you see in blue iris or unifi protect.\u00a0 I would call the Reolink system workable, but definitely not great.<\/p>\n<p>In this last use case, I have to give the win to UniFi protect, but I have a feeling that Blue Iris is going be on par or better within just a few weeks of additional development.\u00a0 Reolink really needs to invest some time and money into the development of their PC app if they want to compete with blue iris and unifi protect.<\/p>\n<p>Next lets talk about privacy, and let me just put it out there.\u00a0 If you make a comment about how Reolink can\u2019t be trusted because they are a Chinese company, let me just stop you there.\u00a0 You shouldn\u2019t be just blindly trusting any company.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care if they have an office based in the US, or a friendly sounding name, blindly trusting companies to keep your data safe and protect your privacy is a bad plan, period.\u00a0 Also, trusting yourself to keep your data private might also be a bad plan.<\/p>\n<p>When viewing your cameras remotely your phone will need to establish a connection to your NVR which is located in your house.\u00a0 This means that you\u2019ll need some way of knowing your home IP address which can change weekly, daily, or never based on your internet service provider, and then you need to allow traffic looking for your NVR to pass into your network.\u00a0 There are a few ways to accomplish this:\u00a0 The least secure in my opinion is port forwarding your NVR so it is directly exposed to the internet, this allows anyone who scans your IP for open ports to detect that you have a port forwarded NVR and if your NVR has any vulnerabilities, exploits, or weak credentials it can be used as an entry point into your network.<\/p>\n<p>The second option is called P2P which uses a cloud server to connect your NVR and your phone.\u00a0 Since outbound connections are allowed on your network, and only inbound connections are blocked by the firewall, your NVR talks to the same cloud server as your phone and the two get matched up to allow for the transfer of data.\u00a0 A P2P system is not an inherent security risk, but it does require you to trust the company that is running the P2P service, which as I mentioned is generally a bad plan.<\/p>\n<p>The third and best option is to set up a personal VPN.\u00a0 A VPN works by establishing a secure tunnel between your mobile device and your home network.\u00a0 All data passed through the VPN tunnel appears to be originating from inside the network and therefore doesn\u2019t need any port forwarding since it uses the local IP address to access your NVR.\u00a0 VPN traffic is encrypted and is extremely secure, and is my preferred method for accessing my NVR.<\/p>\n<p>The Reolink NVR and app will work with all 3 connection types including VPN, which like I said is my preferred method.\u00a0 You can see here that when I turn off my wifi I can\u2019t access the NVR, but after connecting to my VPN I can use it as if I was on the local network.<\/p>\n<p>Blue iris works with either port forwarding or a VPN, but they do not run their own P2P server.\u00a0 They do however have a dynamic dns type solution where you can use your blue iris license key to look up your home ip address with the app.\u00a0 Any time your home IP changes, the app will contact the blue iris license server to determine your new IP, which is a nice feature if you don\u2019t already have another way of keeping track of your home IP, but still requires port forwarding, which I wouldn\u2019t recommend.\u00a0 Seriously, you should setup a VPN if you want to exposes services on your network to the internet.<\/p>\n<p>Easily in last place in this category, UniFi protect only works with P2P using their cloud login.\u00a0 I have no idea why the UniFi protect app can\u2019t work locally, but it\u2019s infuriating. If my VPN is running on my dream machine why can\u2019t I access the cameras that are also running on my dream machine?\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u00a0 UniFi needs to fix this, it\u2019s inexcusable.<\/p>\n<p>The very last consideration to make when managing your own NVR is data loss protection.\u00a0 Surveillance hard drives are under a huge amount of read write stress all the time.\u00a0 Combine that with the fact that people tend to place their NVRs in low air flow areas and you get a recipe for dead hard drives.\u00a0 When your NVR hard drive dies, so does all the footage written to it.\u00a0 If security is absolutely critical to your situation, you should consider a multiple hard drive system.<\/p>\n<p>Having redundant disks or RAID is a common way to prevent data loss, but it can\u2019t be done unless you have multiple hard drives.\u00a0 With 2 drives you can setup a RAID1 system where the drives are exact clones of each other, and with 3 drives you can setup RAID5 where each drive actually becomes faster by splitting up the data between those drives, as well as being able to tolerate a failure of one of the three drives.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that the Reolink system and the dream machine pro can only handle a single hard drive and have no onboard raid controller whereas a PC like the one we are using for blue iris can easily be setup in RAID1 or RAID5 for maximum data loss protection.<\/p>\n<p>Because the Reolink NVRs have an option to expand their storage with an eSATA connection, you could theoretically buy an external RAID5 enabled drive system and then hook it up via eSATA to back up your footage, but I\u2019ve never tried it myself.<\/p>\n<p>UniFi has their own solution to this problem, their UNVR is a standalone system for unifi protect with 4 hot swappable drives and a processor powerful enough to support up to 15 4K cameras or 50 1080p cameras.\u00a0 It costs $300 and still doesn\u2019t include an HDMI out port, but in my opinion if you\u2019re going to spend the money on a UniFi system there is absolutely no reason to run it on your UDM:Pro, and you should cough up the extra $300 to get a dedicated NVR.<\/p>\n<p>And that leads me to my final thoughts:<\/p>\n<p>I just don\u2019t know how anyone can justify the price of UniFi protect.\u00a0 Does it work? Sure.\u00a0 But it costs astronomically more than other systems, ties you into a specific ecosystem which significantly limits your camera selection, and doesn\u2019t allow for the simplest of things like VPN local connectivity\u2026 I don\u2019t know\u2026 if you are a diehard UniFi protect user, let me know what I\u2019m missing down in the comments.<\/p>\n<p>If you want a simple, expandable, plug and play system with AI person detection, can you really do better than the Reolink system?\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure you can.\u00a0 The cameras are high quality and the NVR offers great performance right out of the box without any extra work on your part.\u00a0 The entire package costs $475 and can be expanded to 8 cameras for less than $200 more.\u00a0 Sure, it\u2019s not as customizable or accurate as the blue iris system or even the unifi protect system, but it\u2019s so cheap, and so easy.\u00a0 Unless you are looking to tinker, or you are what people call a \u201cpower user\u201d then the Reolink system is your best bet.<\/p>\n<p>For that last category of users, the tinkers and power users, blue iris can\u2019t be beat.\u00a0 If you already have a home server the $69 for a blue iris license will be the best money you\u2019ve ever spent.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have a home server and you consider yourself a power user, it might be time to look into getting one and exploring all the different services that you can run on your home network.\u00a0 If you are looking to setup blue iris from scratch stay tuned for my next video for a full walk through of that process.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you to my awesome patrons over at patreon for your continued support of my channel, if you\u2019re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links in the description.\u00a0 If you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing, and as always, thanks for watching the hookup.<\/p>\n<h5>Blue Iris Build:<\/h5>\n<h5>Blue Iris NVR Software: <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/3dwlGRg\">https:\/\/bit.ly\/3dwlGRg<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>\u00a0Ebay Listing Dell Optiplex: <a href=\"https:\/\/ebay.us\/XES8ah\">https:\/\/ebay.us\/XES8ah<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>\u00a0Surveillance Grade Hard Drive: <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3apRpl6\">https:\/\/amzn.to\/3apRpl6<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>Reolink NVR:<\/h5>\n<h5>(AmazonUS): <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3atxiCJ\">https:\/\/amzn.to\/3atxiCJ<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>\u00a0(Reolink Direct): <a href=\"https:\/\/reolink.com\/product\/rlk8-810b4-a\/?aff=50\">https:\/\/reolink.com\/product\/rlk8-810b4-a\/?aff=50<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>\u00a0(AliExpress): <a href=\"https:\/\/s.click.aliexpress.com\/e\/_9uzH7h\">https:\/\/s.click.aliexpress.com\/e\/_9uzH7h<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5><\/h5>\n<h5>\u00a0**As an Amazon Affiliate I earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you**<\/h5>\n<h5>**As an eBay Affiliate I earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you**<\/h5>\n<h5>Follow me on Twitter: @TheHookUp1<\/h5>\n<h5>Join me on Facebook: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/473812443269387\/?ref=share\">https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/473812443269387\/?ref=share<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5>Support my channel:<\/h5>\n<h5>Patreon: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/thehookup\">https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/thehookup<\/a><\/h5>\n<h5><\/h5>\n<h5>Music by www.BenSound.com<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reolink vs Protect vs Blue Iris Today on the hookup we\u2019re going to do a head to head showdown pitting the three of the most popular wired security camera systems with AI person and vehicle against each other. I\u2019ll give you an in depth look at UniFi Protect, Reolink\u2019s RLK8 NVR and Blue Iris with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"mb":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["title","gutenberg_elementor_mode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5081,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions\/5081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesmarthomehookup.com\/test_install\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}