UniFi Protect, from Ubiquiti Inc has been updated today from 1.14.11 to 1.15.0 but only on the UniFi Dream Machine Pro and the UNVR, both of which run UniFi OS. UniFi CloudKey Gen2 Plus is a few releases behind and is currently on 1.13.7, which came out a few days ago.
Ubiquiti has added a few new features, bug fixes and changes with the new update. We’ll provide a link to the UniFi forum posts at the end of this article, but we’ll cover the main changes here.
Changes
There is a lot to unpack, as this is quite a large update, but first of all Ubiquiti has added something called ‘Smart Detection’ and this is only supported on the new G4 line of cameras, which is the G4-Pro and the G4 Bullet. It is only supported on the new hardware, as the ‘detection’ is actually done on the camera, as opposed to moving the video footage back to the NVR and doing the processing post capture, which would be slower. The G3 line of cameras just don’t have the hardware capable to do this.
This feature, outlined in more detail in this screenshot I got after updating will be able to distinguish between people and other objects – at the moment, at least exposed in the user interface, can only detect people. This update came out about 3-4 hours ago and I have updated my system, but as of writing I have not had any detections. I would personally hope it will be able to one day read number plates, detect a car, animals and much more.
This feature can be enabled or disabled, but as ever Ubiquiti is a bit like Apple and they do respect your privacy.
G4 cameras now also support high frame rate. Up until now the G3 line of cameras max out at 30fps and the G4 Pro and G4 Bullet were maxed at 24fps but the G4 Pro now supports up to 60fps, I can’t confirm whether the G4 Bullet does, but the way it is worded by Ubiquiti makes it sound like it will support all G4 cameras.
A note I found with the G4 Pro and high frame rate, enabling it does disable HDR – personally I find HDR to make a night and day difference, especially at night time so I won’t be enabling high frame rate.
Also with this update, we have a new dashboard, with detailed information about the NVR hardware on the left, temperature, what hard drives are installed etc. At the top would be snapshots of what it detected, and taking up most of the space is a graph of motion events, time along the bottom and from what I can work out, how many events per hour and when up the side.
Other than those headlining features, we have a new settings page, new grid views for motion events and a long list of bug fixes and improvements. Ubiquiti has also added the ability for the ViewPort to cycle camera based on time or motion.
Update: Once 4.28.6 was auto updated on the cameras at around 22:10 BST, the smart detections worked.
