Protect Panes

UniFi Protect live view, one camera per window. Place each window anywhere on the screen, at any size, next to whatever else you run (exacqVision, etc.). Positions are remembered. Connects to several consoles at once (e.g. Building and Garage).

⬇ Download for Windows (installer, 64-bit Windows 10 or 11) · Portable zip · All releases · Website

Demo mode: test patterns and a synthetic 360° image stand in for camera video.

• No RTSP/RTSPS. Video comes over the console's own livestream connection, the same one Protect's web UI uses. You can leave RTSPS turned off on every camera.
• Direct, local login. Signs into each console by IP with a local account. No UI.com, no cloud, no MFA prompt.
• Light on resources. One process, GPU video decoding, Medium quality by default, and minimized windows stop streaming.
• Live view only. No playback, timeline or events.

Install (Windows 10/11, 64-bit)

Installer (recommended): download ProtectPanes-Setup.exe from the latest release and run it.

• It installs for your Windows user only, with no admin prompt, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\protect-panes.
• It adds Start menu and desktop shortcuts, and appears in Settings → Apps for uninstalling.
• The app isn't code-signed, so Windows shows Windows protected your PC: click More info, then Run anyway.

Portable: download ProtectPanes-win32-x64.zip instead and unzip it somewhere permanent in your own profile, e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Protect Panes (next to where Setup.exe installs). Avoid C:\Program Files, which in-place updates can't write to, and folders made at the root of C:\ such as C:\Tools: Windows lets every account on the PC change those, so another user could swap the app for something that runs as you. Then run ProtectPanes.exe.

Either way, you can turn on Start with Windows in the app.

Set up each console

On each UniFi OS console (UDM / UNVR / Cloud Key), create a local account for this app:

• In UniFi OS, add a new admin/user and choose the option that restricts it to local access only. Don't use a UI.com (cloud) account: those require MFA and won't work.
• Give it View Only access in Protect. It never needs anything more.

Then, in Protect Panes, click Add console. Enter a name ("Building"), the console's IP address, and the local username and password. Repeat for the second console ("Garage").

Use

• The camera list has three tabs: Cameras, Layouts and Settings. Hover over any button for a short explanation.
• On Cameras, flip a camera's switch to open its window. Show all opens every camera on that console, and Close all closes them. Each camera remembers its place. Type in Find a camera… to narrow a long list.
• Each camera in the list shows a preview, a still from the camera refreshed about once a minute while the list is open. Hover it for a bigger one. The layout editor shows them too: a small one beside each camera in its list, and the camera's picture in each tile you fill (a 360° camera shows its raw fisheye there, whatever view the tile is set to). Turn them off in Settings → Show camera previews.
• Hide from list on a camera's row tucks a camera you don't use into Hidden from list at the bottom of its console, for example cameras that are offline for now. Show all and the layout editor skip it. Expand the section and click Show in list to bring it back.
• Arrange tiles the camera windows on your screen. Cameras tab → Arrange picks the best-fitting grid for that screen's size and shape; Layouts has fixed choices (2×2, 1+5, 1+7, 3×3, 2+8, 1+12, 4×4, 5×5). The camera at the top left gets the big tile. With Match each camera's quality to its tile size on, small tiles get the Low stream and big ones Medium or High. The tray menu has Arrange windows too.
• Move a window by hovering over it and dragging the bar that appears at the top. Resize from any edge. With Keep video shape on, windows snap to the camera's aspect ratio so there are no black bars.
• Right-click a camera for quality (High / Medium / Low), Always on top, Lock layout, Reconnect, or Close.
• Right-click → Adjust picture… opens Brightness and Contrast sliders for that camera. It changes how the picture is shown, not what the camera records, and can't bring back detail lost in very dark areas.
• Right-click → Apply to all cameras copies that window's quality, always on top, name, time, color range or picture to every camera on both consoles, including ones you haven't opened yet. In the camera list, Quality for all… sets one console's cameras at once.
• Hide cameras (tray menu or the top of the camera list) takes every camera window off the screen and pauses its video. puts exactly those windows back where they were, even after a restart. Each console also has / for just its own cameras.

360° cameras (AI 360 and other fisheyes)

A fisheye camera opens in quad view: four virtual pan/tilt/zoom views of the one stream, laid out like an Axis quad view. Protect tells the app which cameras are fisheye and how they're mounted (ceiling / wall / desk). The image circle is found automatically from the picture.

• Drag inside a view to aim it, and scroll to zoom. Each view remembers where it's pointed.
• Double-click a view to enlarge it to the whole window. Double-click again to return to the quad.
• Right-click → 360° view to switch to Single view (one direction, whole window), Panorama (ceiling: the full 360° as two 180° strips; wall: one 180° strip) or back to the raw fisheye. Aspect ratio in the same menu sets the window's shape: 16:9 (the default), 4:3, 3:2, 1:1, 21:9, or Any shape to size it freely. The views fill whatever shape you pick. In a grid window, the tile sets the shape instead. The same menu has Mount, Lens field of view, Reset views and Adjust image circle…, for when the auto-detected circle is off: drag and scroll to fit the green circle to the edge of the round picture, then click Done.
• Quad and panorama views show the date and time in the corner, since the camera's own timestamp is cut out by the dewarp. It's this PC's clock, so keep the PC's time synced. Right-click → Show time turns it on or off for any window.
• Lock layout also locks the views, so a wall display can't get nudged.

Dewarping is done by the graphics chip on the one stream that's already being decoded, so a 360° camera costs no extra bandwidth. Ordinary Intel integrated graphics (e.g. a Dell OptiPlex) handle it easily. If a PC has no working graphics driver, the app falls back to drawing on the CPU at reduced resolution and shows a one-time notice.

Files

%APPDATA%\Protect Panes\

• config.json: consoles, window positions and settings. Passwords are encrypted with Windows DPAPI, tied to your Windows user account.
• protect-panes.log: connection log, useful when something won't connect.

Troubleshooting

What you see	Fix
"Login rejected"	Use a local-only account, not a UI.com login. Re-enter the password with Edit.
"Can't reach console"	Check the IP. The app retries on its own every 5-60 s.
"Camera offline"	The camera is disconnected in Protect. The window recovers when it's back.
"Presented a different security certificate"	The app remembers each console's certificate from the first time it connects, and stops if a different one shows up. After a UniFi OS reset, update or a replaced console that's expected: click Trust the new certificate… on the console's card. If nothing like that happened, check what's answering at that address first.
"No password saved for this console on this PC"	The console came from Import settings…, which carries no passwords. Enter it with ⋯ → Edit console….
H.265 message	This PC can't decode HEVC. In Protect, set that camera to Standard (H.264) encoding.
Picture behind / choppy	Right-click → pick Medium or Low. High (4K) streams cost the most GPU.
Shadows look crushed / washed out	Many UniFi cameras send full-range video without saying so; the app corrects this automatically. If one camera still looks wrong, try Right-click → Color range → Full or Limited.

Updating the app

Installed copies (from ProtectPanes-Setup.exe, 1.3.0 on) and portable copies from 1.3.1 on can update themselves.

1. The camera list's Settings → Updates shows the update location. By default it's this project's latest GitHub release. To update from your own copy instead, set it to a folder (for example \\server\share\Protect Panes) or web address holding ProtectPanes-win32-x64.zip plus latest.json. Clear it to turn update checks off.
2. Click Check for updates. A newer version is downloaded and checked first: it has to carry the release signature this copy of the app trusts, and match its signed checksum. Anything else is refused.
3. Click Install … and restart. The app closes, installs the new version and opens again. Installer copies run the new installer silently; portable copies swap their folder. Settings and layouts carry over.

From 1.4.0 on, most updates are small. When a release uses the same Electron as the copy you're running, only the app's own file changes, so the download is a couple of MB instead of 120-160 MB. Releases that move to a new Electron still come as the full installer or zip. One side effect on installed copies: Settings → Apps keeps showing the version the installer last wrote until the next full update. The app's own About section always shows the real version.

The folder the app lives in has to be one you can write to and other accounts can't, e.g. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Protect Panes, not C:\Program Files or a folder at the root of C:\. When an update location is set, the app also checks once at startup (one small request for latest.json) and says so in the list and the tray menu. It never downloads without a click.

Portable copies older than 1.3.1 can't update themselves. 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 download the update, then fail with a file in it is still in use and reopen the old version. Install once by hand: quit the app (tray → Quit) and run ProtectPanes-Setup.exe (your settings carry over), or replace the folder with the latest zip.

Keeping up with new Protect versions

Protect Panes talks to Protect through the unifi-protect library, the same one homebridge-unifi-protect uses. It tracks Protect firmware changes. If a future Protect update breaks login or video, rebuild with the latest library (needs Node.js 22.20+):

npm install
npm install unifi-protect@latest
npm run build:win

The new build lands in dist\. Your settings in %APPDATA% carry over.

Development

npm install
npm start              # run from source (quit the installed app first)
npm run mock           # fake consoles with test patterns
npm test               # regression tests: mock cameras + fake UniFi OS consoles (~6 min)
npm run build:win      # portable Windows build + zip in dist\

The tests run the real app. Its windows stay invisible and click-through, and never take the focus, so you can keep working while they run. Set PANES_TEST_SHOW=1 to watch them.

See CLAUDE.md for architecture, gotchas and the test harness, and ROADMAP.md for what's been asked for and how each item was investigated.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.