I have 4 cameras in my home using Surveillance station, and I have close to a hundred Unifi Video cameras deployed for work.On Synology Surveillance Station, the camera, I/O module, and access controllers are all designed for expanding camera, I/O module, and access controllers. Did someone take something from a specific area? Or leave something there and you have hours of video to scrub through? Instead use smart search, highlight the area and it will auto create time stamped thumb nails for motion events in that specific spot of the camera feed and let you jump to them for review. I think one of the most rarely mentioned features is the smart search feature on the desktop app. There are open source and other software comercial options but the feature set and easy of use in Surveillance Station (other than waiting for those DAMN licence cards in the MAIL!) is good. However Ubiquiti ONLY works with its cameras and they are at LEAST $50 more than the cameras I purchases so it is sort of a wash. Which also lets you host your own data, and provides cloud and mobile app support with little or no setup. It lets you run a large variate of cheap or expensive cameras and has a reasonably complete feature set.Ĭlosest thing I would compare it to is Ubiquiti's Unifi Video or now Protect. I settled on the Hikvision for reliability and support and it uses about 4% CPU for 16 cameras viewing or recording. Other options use from 1% to 10% for 16 cameras. Even on my current dual 8-core xeons, Blue Iris uses 30% CPU with just two cameras. I have benchmarked many surveillance apps across many different PC configurations and Blue Iris is the worst performing by far in every single benchmark I performed. So, my suggestion is one of these two scenarios - Synology as storage space only or cheap Synology, 2 cameras per device - and never pay for their licensing. Trying to get one camera per drive in any other Synology scenario is far more expensive and you also have to buy licenses. That gives me a far cheaper solution for one-camera-per-drive than any other solution and using cheap drives as 2TB stores a month's worth of video. I install two 2TB drives and configure two cameras, each saving to one drive.

In other cases, I use the cheapest two-disk - currently DS218j - which takes two drives and comes with two Surveillance Station licenses. In some cases I use my Synology DS to set up a iSCSI NAS and use my Hikvision ivms-4200 running on my monitoring PC and saving to a high-end Synology. I really don't like their licensing model - what business is it of theirs how many cameras I use? So I have two different approaches across my multiple sites using Synology.

After buying many licenses I found a better solution for me. I use Synology Surveillance Station very reluctantly.

Synology camera license problem solving