Your cameras. Your hardware. Recording that never blinks.
EdgeSite NVR puts a memory-safe Rust recording core, on-device AI, and encrypted peer-to-peer remote access on hardware you own. No cloud subscription. No port forwarding. No one else's servers between you and your footage.
- 100% local AI — no frames leave your network
- Remote viewing with zero port forwarding
- Native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac & Apple TV
Most video systems make you choose what to give up
Cloud NVRs take your footage hostage. DIY setups take your weekends. Neither should be the price of watching your own cameras.
✕Cloud lock-in
Monthly fees to view your own cameras, footage on someone else's servers, and a product that stops working when the vendor pivots.
✕Fragile remote access
Port forwarding, dynamic DNS, VPN gymnastics — or laggy cloud proxies that fall over exactly when you need to see what's happening.
✕Noisy, shallow AI
Motion alerts that fire on rain and headlights, cloud "AI" that mails your footage off for analysis, and no way to tune any of it.
✕Silent failures
Recorders that wedge after a camera hiccup and quietly stop recording — and you find out the one day the footage mattered.
Built like infrastructure, because that's what it is
EdgeSite NVR was engineered on one principle: a video recorder is critical infrastructure, and it should behave like it — private by architecture, resilient by design, and pleasant to actually use.
Self-hosted control
Recordings, events, and AI all live on your hardware. No cloud dependency, no subscription required to see your own video, nothing to sunset out from under you.
Remote access done right
WebRTC streams flow peer-to-peer from your NVR to your phone, brokered by a signaling relay that never touches media. No port forwarding, no cloud DVR.
AI at the edge
YOLO-class object detection runs on your NVR's Neural Engine, GPU, or NPU — with motion gating, object tracking, and weather filtering that cut alert noise to what matters.
Engineered to keep recording
A memory-safe Rust core with stall watchdogs, crash recovery, storage pressure guards, and self-repairing indexes. When something misbehaves, EdgeSite heals itself — and keeps recording.
One system, on every screen you use
The same events, timeline, and live view — native on iPhone in your pocket, on the Mac in the office, and on the TV in the den.
iPhone & iPadPush-to-playback in seconds, anywhere
MacMulti-camera synchronized scrub & deep review
Apple TVLean-back monitoring on the big screen
Everything a serious video system needs. Nothing it doesn't.
A recording core that refuses to fall over
The EdgeSite engine is written in Rust on an async core, and it treats every failure as survivable. Each camera runs an independent, supervised recording pipeline — one bad stream never takes down the rest.
- Per-camera stall watchdogs detect frozen streams and respawn them automatically, with backoff.
- Crash recovery on startup: orphaned processes reaped, media index verified and repaired, recording resumed.
- Stream-copy recording — video is written bit-for-bit with near-zero CPU, so a modest box handles many cameras.
- Continuous status reconciliation and system health metrics, visible right in the app.
Intelligent detection that runs entirely on your box
A layered pipeline turns raw motion into a handful of events you actually care about. Frames never leave your network — detection runs on Apple's Neural Engine, AMD GPUs and NPUs, or plain CPU.
- Motion gating with weather-aware filtering — rain and snow are suppressed, people in the rain are not.
- YOLO-class object detection: people, vehicles, and animals, with per-camera zones and sensitivity.
- Object tracking chains sightings into one event per visit — arrivals, departures, and loiterers, not 40 duplicate alerts.
- False-positive defenses built from field experience: reflection scoring, lens-obstruction rejection, stationary-object awareness.
See home from anywhere — without opening a single port
Your NVR keeps one outbound, encrypted connection to a lightweight relay. When you open the app away from home, the relay authenticates your device against your NVR and brokers a WebRTC session; video then streams peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted.
- No port forwarding, no dynamic DNS, no VPN. The relay routes signaling only — media paths are refused at the relay by design.
- STUN-first connectivity with an encrypted TURN fallback for hostile networks and CGNAT.
- Warm connection reuse: switch cameras or jump from live to a recording without renegotiating.
- Bandwidth-aware quality: full resolution on your LAN, efficient sub-streams on cellular — switched automatically.
Playback that lands you on the moment, not near it
Every segment is keyframe-indexed as it's written, and every event is anchored to a precise playback timestamp with pre-roll. Tap an alert and you're watching the person walk up — not scrubbing around looking for them.
- Event-anchored playback with pre-roll, from a keyframe index built continuously in the background.
- A full-day timeline with event markers, thumbnail scrubbing, and a calendar strip for deep history.
- Multi-camera synchronized scrub — follow one moment across every camera at once.
- One-tap clip export to MP4 — remuxed, not re-encoded, so it's fast and full quality.
Storage that plans ahead so you don't have to
EdgeSite records every camera twice — full-resolution and a lightweight sub-stream — then applies retention to each tier independently. The result: pristine recent footage, weeks of reviewable history, and events preserved long after both.
- Two-tier retention: full-res (default 7 days), sub-stream (30 days), events and their footage (90 days).
- Event protection — segments overlapping a detection are exempt from cleanup until the event itself expires.
- HEVC stays HEVC on disk — no wasteful re-encoding — with hardware-accelerated decode for viewing.
- Disk-pressure guardrails: a warning push at 80%, then graduated cleanup that protects event footage to the last.
Native apps for every screen in the house
EdgeSite ships true native apps — not a webview — for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Pair a device by scanning a QR code; revoke it just as fast.
- Rich push notifications with snapshot thumbnails that deep-link straight to the event.
- Act from the lock screen: mute a chatty camera — or everything — for an hour without opening the app.
- Quiet hours with per-label exemptions, alert frequency per camera, and cross-camera dedup so one visitor is one alert.
- Adaptive live grid on every platform, with a lean-back multi-camera view on Apple TV.
Works with the cameras you already own
EdgeSite speaks the protocols your hardware already uses — and where a vendor offers on-camera intelligence, EdgeSite ingests it and folds it into one coherent event stream.
ONVIF discovery
Find every ONVIF camera on your network automatically, pick stream profiles, and pull vendor smart events over ONVIF pull-point subscriptions.
Hikvision AI cameras
Ingest Hikvision's on-camera analytics over ISAPI alert streams: line crossing, intrusion, tamper, face, and package events become first-class EdgeSite events with pushes and playback anchors.
UniFi Protect
Bring UniFi cameras in over their native secure RTSPS streams, main and sub quality — including handling for UniFi's multi-track stream quirks that trip up other recorders.
Dahua, Reolink, Amcrest & more
Vendor URL templates make onboarding one form: brand, IP, credentials, done. Anything else connects with a custom RTSP/RTSPS URL — codec and resolution detected automatically.
Home Assistant
Opt-in MQTT publishing in a Frigate-compatible schema — your existing Home Assistant automations and blueprints work by changing one topic prefix.
Webhooks
POST every event to your own endpoints as structured JSON with automatic retries — feed alarms, dashboards, or anything with a URL.
One box at home. One relay in the middle. Nothing else.
A typical deployment is a single machine on your network running the EdgeSite server, your cameras, and the apps — with an optional signaling relay for remote access.
Install the server
Run EdgeSite on a machine you own — an Apple Silicon Mac mini is a favorite — with any local storage volume.
Add your cameras
Auto-discover via ONVIF, pick a vendor template, or paste an RTSP URL. EdgeSite probes each stream and starts recording immediately.
Pair your devices
Scan a QR code to pair each iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV. Every device gets its own revocable credential.
Go anywhere
Live view, timeline, and events work at home over your LAN and away over encrypted peer-to-peer WebRTC. That's it — there is no step five.
Engineering decisions you can feel
Every layer of EdgeSite was chosen for the same reason: it keeps working under stress. Here's what's under the hood.
Memory-safe Rust core
The entire server — recording, playback, AI orchestration, API — is Rust on an async runtime. The buffer-overflow class of vulnerability endemic to C/C++ video software is off the table. tokio axum
Copy, don't re-encode
Recording is a bit-for-bit stream copy into indexed MPEG-TS segments. HEVC stays HEVC on disk. CPU stays free for detection, and quality is exactly what the camera sent. stream-copy
Standards-based WebRTC
Remote streaming uses a pure-Rust WebRTC stack with congestion feedback and packet-loss recovery, STUN-first connectivity, and ephemeral HMAC TURN credentials — never a proprietary cloud pipe. webrtc-rs SRTP
Isolated inference
AI runs via ONNX Runtime in a supervised worker process that's recycled on a schedule — an inference-runtime fault can never stall recording. ort CoreML DirectML ROCm
PostgreSQL foundations
Configuration and the recording/keyframe index live in Postgres with compile-time-checked queries — and the index is verified and repaired against what's actually on disk at every startup. sqlx
Encrypted by default
Camera credentials sealed at rest with ChaCha20-Poly1305 under a local master key. Device tokens stored hashed; passwords via Argon2; TLS everywhere via rustls. chacha20poly1305 argon2
Trusted by people who can't afford gaps in the footage
"We replaced a cloud NVR that charged per camera per month and still fell over on remote playback. EdgeSite has run on a Mac mini in the comms closet for over a year — the watchdog restarts a flaky camera before I even see the alert. The footage is just always there."
"The Hikvision integration is the real thing. Line-crossing and intrusion events from the cameras land in the same timeline as EdgeSite's own person detection, with one push notification scheme. My clients get one coherent system instead of three apps."
"Remote access with zero port forwarding sold me; the playback kept me. Tap a notification on cellular and you're watching the event with pre-roll in a couple of seconds, streamed peer-to-peer from my own hardware. Nothing else self-hosted comes close on iOS."
"Rain used to mean 200 motion alerts a night across our lot cameras. EdgeSite's weather filtering plus object tracking got us to a handful of real events — and the MQTT feed drops straight into our existing Home Assistant automations."
Buy it once. Own it. No per-camera tax.
EdgeSite NVR is licensed per server, not per camera — and your footage is never held behind a subscription.
Core
For homes and small offices
one-time · per server · 1 year of updates
- Up to 8 cameras
- Full AI detection, tracking & smart events
- All apps: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV
- MQTT & webhook integrations
- Community support
Pro
For power users and professional sites
one-time · per server · 3 years of updates
- Unlimited cameras
- Everything in Core
- EdgeSite Relay service — remote access with no port forwarding, incl. TURN fallback
- Priority email support
- Guided setup session
Enterprise
For multi-site and regulated deployments
volume licensing · tailored terms
- Everything in Pro
- Multi-server, multi-site licensing
- Self-hosted relay option on your infrastructure
- Support SLA & dedicated contact
- Deployment & migration assistance
Every tier starts with a fully-featured 30-day trial. Perpetual license — the software keeps working after your update window ends.
Questions serious buyers ask
What hardware do I need to run EdgeSite NVR?
Any reasonably modern machine you control. An Apple Silicon Mac (a Mac mini is ideal) gets hardware AI on the Neural Engine; Linux hosts can accelerate on AMD GPUs, and Windows on AMD NPUs or DirectML — with CPU fallback everywhere. Recording itself is stream-copy and nearly free; budget disk for per-camera bitrate × your retention window.
Is there any cloud dependency at all?
Recording, AI, playback, and LAN viewing are fully local and work with the internet unplugged. The only optional cloud component is the signaling relay for remote access — and it carries authentication and session setup only. Media paths are refused at the relay by architecture; video always flows peer-to-peer between your device and your NVR.
How does remote access work without port forwarding?
Your NVR maintains a single outbound encrypted WebSocket to the relay, so nothing on your network is exposed. When your app connects from outside, the relay asks your NVR to verify the device's credential, then brokers a WebRTC session. NAT traversal is STUN-first with an encrypted TURN fallback for carrier-grade NAT and hostile networks.
Which cameras are supported?
Anything that speaks RTSP or RTSPS. ONVIF cameras are auto-discovered; Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, Amcrest, Wyze, and UniFi Protect have one-form vendor onboarding; everything else connects with a custom URL. Hikvision on-camera AI (line crossing, intrusion, tamper, face, package) and ONVIF smart events are ingested natively.
How is my system secured?
Devices pair on your LAN via QR code and receive individually revocable, hashed tokens with roles — pairing never works remotely. Camera credentials are encrypted at rest with ChaCha20-Poly1305 under a locally generated master key. Remote video is SRTP/DTLS end-to-end, the relay stores no accounts and no media, and admin actions are audit-logged.
Does AI detection send anything to the cloud?
No. Object detection runs on your NVR's own silicon via ONNX Runtime. Not a single frame leaves your network for analysis, and detection keeps working with the internet down.
What happens when the disk fills up?
Retention normally handles it: full-res, sub-stream, and event tiers each age out on their own schedule, and footage tied to events is protected. If the disk still runs hot, you get a storage warning push at 80% and graduated cleanup engages at 90% — oldest non-event footage first, event footage only as an absolute last resort.
How do updates and support work?
Licenses are perpetual — the software never stops working. Core includes one year of updates and community support; Pro extends updates to three years with priority support and the hosted relay; Enterprise adds SLAs and tailored terms. Renewing an update plan is optional, never required.
We build video infrastructure for people who read the logs
EdgeSite Technologies exists because our founders spent years operating video systems that failed in quiet, expensive ways — cloud recorders that lost footage during outages, DIY stacks that wedged over a weekend, "AI" that cried wolf every time it rained.
So we built the recorder we wanted to run: a memory-safe core that assumes cameras will misbehave and networks will flap, and engineers around it. Watchdogs, crash recovery, index self-repair, and storage guardrails aren't features on a roadmap — they're the foundation everything else sits on.
We're a small, senior team. We ship deliberately, we document honestly, and we measure ourselves on a single number: how long our users go without thinking about us.
EdgeSite founded. First Rust recording core deployed on our own homes and offices.
On-device AI ships. Detection moves onto the Neural Engine — no frame ever leaves the network again.
Remote Access v2. Peer-to-peer WebRTC with a signaling-only relay replaces every port-forward and proxy path.
4.x LTS line. Hardened relay auth, TURN fallback tier, and the event-protected retention engine.
Documentation that respects your time
Installation guide
From download to first recording in minutes, on macOS, Linux, or Windows.
Read the guide →Camera onboarding
ONVIF discovery, vendor templates, custom RTSP, and dual-stream best practices.
Read the guide →Remote access
How the relay, WebRTC, and the P2P security model fit together.
Read the guide →MQTT & webhooks
Wire events into Home Assistant and your own systems.
Read the guide →Put your cameras back under your control
Run EdgeSite NVR free for 30 days — every feature, your hardware, no card required.