Surveillance Station 8.0 Beta

The main purpose of today's review is to cover the new beta version of the Surveillance Station app and to show you its capabilities with an entry level NAS like the DS416j. The DS416j supports up to 16 IP cameras and comes with two free licenses. If you need more than two IP cameras, you will have to purchase additional licenses. Each license will set you back by around $50.

Synology's Surveillance Station supports over 5200 IP cameras from 90 brands. You can find the compatibility list here. Its Live View mode supports up to 49 channels @ 1080p on a single Live View display and also features Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) and digital zoom support. There is even an option to add an e-map of the area where the IP cameras are installed, and you can take snapshots of any of them. Other features include invisible watermarking, which can be validated through the Synology Evidence Integrity Authenticator, iOS and Android support, time slicing, and smart search. Another interesting characteristic of Surveillance Station is that it can, as it utilizes Synology Web Object, operate in most popular Windows browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer) without Java and with Windows Active Directory and LLDAP for improved permissions control.

Surveillance Station allows you to look at its live feed and recordings on multiple Synology NAS servers (NVRs in this case) through a single portal, the Central Management System (CMS). Logs from all recording servers and the camera licenses on your clients are centralized on the CMS host. This page has more on the capabilities and specifications of Synology's Surveillance Station.

Instead of the latest stable version, we chose to take a look at the newest beta version of Surveillance Station, which offers some major updates with the most important being native client and H.265 codec support. Surveillance Station 8.0 also supports more advanced action rules and events and allows you to set up one or more spare servers in order not to lose any camera feeds should the main storage space not be accessible.

Another major change is the support of built-in camera IVA (Interactive Visual Analysis) tools. In short, IVA consists of a set of techniques for combining the computational power of computers with the perceptive and cognitive capabilities of humans in order to extract knowledge from large and complex data sets. With IVA support, Synology claims the off-load calculation tasks to pass from the server's CPU to the cameras' own computing power, which means more IVAs can be performed simultaneously. Surveillance Station 8.0 even supports ACAP plugins for more advanced video analysis options.

Some more new features of the Surveillance Station 8 Beta are its pop-up notifications, passive Infrared (PIR) detection support, which allows for the identification of the movement of living creatures in dark environments, built-in server search option and enhanced backup functionality.

Installing the Surveillance Station 8 Beta - Admin Interface

You have to enable the corresponding setting shown in the screenshot above in Package Center in order to install the beta version of Surveillance Station.


Surveillance Station's interface shares some similarities with that of DSM, offering so many features that it can easily be described as a dedicated surveillance OS. You will find a taskbar similar to the one in DSM; it includes the notifications, administrator's, search, and widget icons.


There is a start menu that will give you access to many interesting options.

Setting up the cameras

You will first have to set up your IP cameras in order to use Surveillance Station. We used the two Amcrest cameras and thought it would be nice to give their bundled app a shot before having Synology's app look for them.


There is a program that allows you to find the IP's of the cameras on your network. As you can see, it managed to discover our cameras without any problems. If you face any problems during this process, you had better take a look at the settings to set the correct IP address.


Here are some screenshots of the bundled software. It offers a decent number of options and settings, including video, net, and encoding options. The last tab named "info" will show you the serial number and firmware version of your camera(s). There is also the "update" tab, but its use is obvious.


We followed the guide to add our cameras and used the quick setup option. The application managed to find all our IP cameras.


We didn't run into any problems while adding the Armcrest cameras.


Chrome is incompatible with the NPAPI plug-in, so we proceeded with Firefox.


The detection source can be provided by the camera's own hardware to take a load off the NAS server's SoC, or by Surveillance Station.


Here are the I/O camera settings.


Here are the PTZ control options.


Here are the Live View analytics and preview windows.


Here's the camera status window.

Camera settings

Let's now dive into the camera settings a bit more.


You can see the camera's info, change the video and audio format, and set a stream profile in the device settings menu, and can configure some advanced options, including the transport protocol selection and keep-alive method. You an also enable a low bandwidth profile should you want to keep network traffic low.


The recording menu allows you to configure important settings, like the pre- and post-recording time, time interval for saving the video feed, and the archive folder's storage limit in order to keep storage space utilization under control. There are three more tabs in this menu: Profile, Schedule, and Advanced. The Schedule options are probably the most important for most users.


You can set various relevant options and enable multicast through the Live View settings.


The Optimization menu includes Time Sync, OSD, exposure mode, and video-orientation settings, and, in its Advanced tab, the ability to force the cameras to restart periodically to ensure their OS works properly under all circumstances.

Action Rules

Various action rules for recordings can be set here. There is a wizard to guide you through this process.