Qnap Surveillance Station Virtual Camera

Simple installation in Surveillance Station. Pricey though.

We have purchased two of these so far to use primarily as NVRs for a large number of IP cameras on a school campus. Licensing costs aside, Synology Surveillance Station does a really nice job making it easy to set up and scale with the number of cameras you have. We linked two together, making one the primary and the other a secondary target for recordings. Surveillance Station records direct-to-disk, and does a decent job of adjusting camera settings directly using ONVIF. We have about 50+ cameras running at resolutions from 1280x720 up to 2560x1600, some PTZ, some ceiling-mount fisheyes, mostly wide angle fixed, and everything works pretty well. We were even able to use the manual camera configuration to use some uncommon double-lens cameras. With about 26 cameras assigned to each RS422+, we see about 20-25% CPU on each on average during a typical day. We can comfortably handle 32 per unit, and supposedly up to 40 if needed. With x4 6TB drives in each set in SHR-1 (equivalent to RAID5) we have about a month or so of footage retention. The licensing is a little pricey at $50 per camera (unless you buy in bulk from some european IP camera shops...), but it is perpetual and I think worth the expense. Using two of these units, 8 cheap drives from eBay (luckily these do not suffer from the Synology whitelist) and a bunch of camera licenses, for around under $5000 I was able to build and set up a really easy to use and reliable NVR system with plenty of future expandability. 2-3 users are regularly connected on their desktops without issue.

easy to order and easy to install for an additional camera in my surveillance station for my synology NAS

The Synology Surveillance Station software is the best security camera software we have used, having tried two before this. It is more costly having to buy licenses for each camera you want to use but at least the licenses are transferrable between hardware upgrades and not bound to a specific camera's MAC Address or hardware. The software is very smooth and easy to use with advanced feature available if needed. It has otherwise been very plug-n-play switching over.

There are lots of free applications for IP Cameras, but if you're serious about IP Surveillance you can't do better than Axis Camera Station, and the best way to acquire the licenses is from B&H.

Surveillance Station is a big upgrade from my 10 year old system...and all I had to do to enable it was buy this license and connect my existing cameras up. Very nice.

This is kind of old school, it is literally a printed card with an alphanumeric license key on it, very 1998. You enter it manually into the Surveillance Station software. I hadn't typed a license key in like 10 years, it was kinda fun. No one likes paying licensing fees, of course. But this is fully transferable, so you can migrate it from one Synology box to another. Synology clearly puts a lot of resources into Surveillance Station, I have been running it for half a decade and it keeps evolving and improving. These products stand the test of time, my 12 year old Synology NAS not only still works, but is still supported. My Synology NVR runs better today than it did when I got it five years ago. So at least you get something for your license fee, and won't ever have to pay it again.

I'm very pleased with the Synology Surveillance system. Disk storage is a central part of a security camera system, and when I started researching additional storage for my old Windows-based system, I realized that Synology has a great add-on called Surveillance Station. I bought a Synology storage array with the intention of either using it with my existing Windows system or perhaps with the built-in Surveillance Station. I tested Surveillance Station and it worked really well - great software if you want their stand-along application - great web interface if you don't want to use the desktop app - and a great mobile app. I threw out the old Windows box and went with this complete solution instead. I will also point out that Synology offered me free trial licensees so I could test this with all 32 of my cameras at once. Definitely worth contacting them if you have questions or want a full-scale trial.

Just enter the license key into surveillance station and add your four devices. That is it.� If the price point is too expensive for you then this level of product is not for you.

We have 4 of these currently deployed in a Synology NAS for local file sharing/backup and a 5th for Synology Surveillance Station as a separate volume. They have not given us any issues and we have had a few of these deployed for 3+ years currently.