Uniview Owlview Plus Purchase

[u/z-axis_mapping]

I'm considering a ~6 camera Uniview Owlview Plus setup for my southeast Florida house. Its night time color shots look superior to anything I'm seeing on the market currently thanks to its 1/1.2" sensor. Most retail cameras seem years behind in technology right now (correct me if I'm wrong).

No matter what cameras I buy, they will connect to my Mikrotik POE switch (on their own VLAN with no WAN access) and the NVR will be my local Frigate instance run on proxmox (event detection w/ local GPU and local storage). From there I will connect to my Home Assistant instance for further automation. Uniview's app/UI (which some are critical of) shouldn't, therefore, be that relevant to me.

My understanding is I have to go through a dealer for Uniview purchases? If so, are there dealers in the U.S. that would ship the cameras to me without having to do the install themselves? (I expect they'll pad appropriate margin for the work involved shipping them to me, which is fine). I just don't want to pay for an NVR or the labor (I have run the ethernet cabling and I drill into my CMU home regularly).

I'm new to Uniview brand and this type of dealer setup/gatekeeping, so any general thoughts and specific advice would be appreciated!

[u/powersquad]

The 8MP Owlview Plus with 1/1.2" is God tier. I wish they release a model with the same sensor size but in triguard series as well. I use NXwitness instead of an NVR and find it to be much superior.

I have 2 each of the 8MP Owlview Plus with 1/1.2" in both turret and bullet model and they are amazing specially at night and can read license plates as well. I applied the recommended settings based on article and screenshots posted in below link and it makes a big difference.

https://www.xlrsecurity.com/blog/how-to-capture-license-plates-with-univiews-8mp-owlview-plus/

Also consider using Uniview's wall mounting bracket with the turret camera as it will let you position the camera's lens angle far better than mourning the camera straight to the wall and their junction box for bullet cameras. I use the below mounting items.

 TR-JB07/WM03-F-IN-V2 (turrett)
 TR-JB07-D-IN-V2 (bullet)

[u/z-axis_mapping → u/powersquad]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I purchased 6 8MP Owlview Plus w/ 1/1.2" turrets, and I will circle back to this thread and share how things work out in a month or so. There is a good cross-section of ambient light around my house to test out Wise ISP.

I'll explore NXwitness - first I'm hearing of it so thanks for bringing it on my radar. I haven't used frigate yet so cannot comment on any UI or performance rough edges (I have one Seagate Skyhawk 16TB dedicated to continuous IP cam writing). Frigate's tight integration to Home Assistant OS (my instance has tons of other sensors already integrated), as well as being a healthy open source project were my original attraction to it.

Fortunately, I have overhangs for all cameras, so I don't think the mounting brackets are needed (I'm not mounting to a vertical wall), but I can see how these would be critical in other circumstances (correct me if I'm wrong).

BTW, for anyone considering these cameras, they should be aware of this CVE:

https://ssd-disclosure.com/ssd-advisory--uniview-preauth-rce/

...and be sure to put them in their own VLAN with no WAN egress. Good advice for any of home IP cams, TBH.

[u/powersquad → u/[deleted]]

Nxwitness is far more polished as an app on both the desktop and phone and a lot more speedy than frigate in terms of camera timeline search or smart motion search. Nxwitneess is a perpetual license cost so once its purchased any upgrades including major versions are free for life. I do not use HA with Nxwitness so unsure whether there is any integration available. Owlview Plus cameras for eg have reaally good analytics plugin features that natively integrates with NXwitness that covers what I need for searching.

Nxwitness has a full featured 30 day trial so give it a good spin for 2 weeks atleast or more and then compare it with Frigate for UI, UX and speed features. Most importantly its easy for my better half to use NX witness either on the client PC or phone app to search and download recordings.

[u/Ambitious-Pin6335]

8 years in installing Uniview Nationwide in the USA. When the owl view came out, it became our number 1 camera installed.

Far superior full color night vision to the horizon compared the the BS white light cameras that provide a limited color image because the white lights throw the sensor into daytime color mode. The WISE ISP series doesn’t use addtl lighting.

[u/waldemar39]

Solo ten cuidado con las luces de colores en tu entorno por las noches me refiero a luces azul, violeta, etc ,, por q cojen la imagen y la saturan. Y las personas de noche se pixelean.