CoPSA

I work for a small city in Northern NY and we use 4 of the AirCams with the UniFi Video 3.0.7 Beta as the NVR for them. I bought one to try at home a few years back and tried AirVision 1.x and it didn't work well enough to even consider using. AirVision 2 was a different story and worked well enough that I stuck with it instead of going with Milestone which is a great system but isn't free (although they do have some very reasonable prices for the basic package). It worked well enough that we decided to try it for monitoring several Kiosks we deployed throughout the city and haven't had any major issues with it. The quality of the cameras have been pretty accurately described in this post so I won't address that. You get a very decent camera for the price. It doesn't compare to the HD cameras we use at the police department but they cost $800ish each and the AirCams give you far more than 1/8th the performance of those. As far as CPU usage on the NVR goes it doesn't seem to be that high in our system. We are currently running UniFi Video 3.0.7 Beta (the latest official release v3.0.5 gave us a few connection problems that 3.0.7 fixed) on a 6 year old Dell OptiPlex 755 (Intel Core2Duo 3.0 GHz) running Win7 x64 with 8GB RAM and a new 2TB drive for the recorded video. I have checked it several times and the CPU usage stays consistently between 5% - 10% occasionally peeking around 20% while streaming all 4 cameras on a different PC. When viewing the 4 streams on the 755 itself the CPU usage bounces between 20% - 40%. Two of the streams are very active (busy city intersections with lost of traffic) while two have little activity. So you can run the NVR software on a pretty modest machine with good results (while only using 4 cameras anyways). We like the cameras and software enough that we're using them for a DIY security system at one of the other departments for about 1/10th of the lowest quote we received from the local vendors. To be fair their systems are probably more robust but the Ubiquiti system is more than we need. I'm working on a Server 2012 R2 Guest running on a new ESXi host to run all of the cameras on and we'll see how that fares. So far with only 1 test camera it's doing fine.