Camural is a small desktop app for UniFi® Protect. It gives every camera on your console its own window on the desktop, and raises a notification with the camera's snapshot already inside it when something happens. On Windows it lives in the tray; on the Mac, in the menu bar. Video travels from your own console to your computer and stops there. No account, no cloud relay, no telemetry, no crash reporting, nothing to subscribe to.
$14.99 once, with a 14-day trial that needs no card. Everything about the product, including the purchase page, is at camural.com.
Installers and an issue tracker. Every published version is under Releases, and an installed copy of Camural asks this page once a day whether a newer build exists. That daily check is the only request the app makes to anything other than your own console, and it is described in the privacy policy.
There is no source code here and none is coming. Camural is proprietary software, licensed under the terms the Windows installer also shows. The screenshots on this page are served from camural.com rather than from the repository, because nothing but release assets is stored here.
Both downloads are on the download page with their current version and size, and under Releases here.
Windows:
CamuralApp-win-Setup.exe,
about 122 MB, which Windows will show as 116 MB. That link always resolves to the newest release, so
it never goes stale. The installer puts Camural in %LOCALAPPDATA%\CamuralApp for your Windows user
alone and never asks for administrator. Do not run it elevated: Windows silently discards
notifications raised by elevated programs, which breaks the main reason to install it. Builds are
signed by Seth Walker through Azure Trusted Signing.
Mac: Camural-<version>.dmg, about 61 MB, attached to the newest release. Open the disk image
and drag Camural into your Applications folder. It is signed by Seth Walker and notarized by Apple,
so Gatekeeper checks it with Apple and lets it open with the standard "downloaded from the internet"
prompt. There is no main window: the menu bar item is the whole app.
Updates download quietly in the background on both. Windows applies one when you next exit, never mid-session, and before applying it copies your console details, per-camera rules, confirmed certificates, layouts and licence into a dated backup folder, keeping the last ten. The Mac verifies a downloaded update against Apple's notarization and Camural's own signing identity, and installs it when Camural restarts.
- Every camera opens in its own frameless window you drag where you want. Windows snap to screen edges and to each other, keep the camera's own aspect ratio instead of stretching it, so a 4:3 doorbell never ends up in a 16:9 box, and belong to a monitor rather than a coordinate, so unplugging a screen parks those cameras instead of leaving them decoding off the edge of the desktop.
- Per camera, from a right-click menu: always on top, locked in place, four corner presets, and
which stream quality it pulls. On Windows,
Ctrl+Alt+Craises every camera above your other windows, and pressing it again puts them back. - Double-click a camera for a full-size watch window on its high-quality stream.
- A camera wall drawn behind everything on your desktop, behind your icons and behind every window, costing no screen space. You place the tiles on a scaled model of your actual monitors. Camural does not replace your wallpaper. It draws tiles over it and leaves the rest showing.
- PTZ cameras point from a bar of saved positions, from the right-click menu, or from the number keys in the watch window. Patrols start and stop from the same menu. A game controller (Xbox, DualSense or DualShock 4) drives pan, tilt and zoom, but only while the watch window is the one you are using, so a pad plugged in for a game cannot pan a camera.
- Notifications carry the frame that triggered them, full width, above the camera name. Motion, person, vehicle, animal, package, licence plate, loitering, line crossing and doorbell rings, plus the sounds Protect recognises: smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, glass breaking, sirens, a baby crying and barking.
- Which of those raise a notification is set per camera, so plain motion can be off on the road-facing camera while people stay on. Audio alarms have a switch of their own, because turning off motion should never turn off the alert about a fire.
- Alert history for the last 24 hours with the snapshots kept alongside, because both Windows and macOS drop banners while you are in a game or presenting, and history is then the only record.
- Several Protect consoles at once, each camera routed to the console that owns it, so two sites that both have a Front Door never collide over alerts, rules or layout.
- Hardware decoding, through Direct3D on Windows and the Apple silicon media engine on the Mac, the low-bandwidth substream by default in the grid, and pause rules that stop the decoders when the screen is covered, locked, on battery or in energy saver.
Alerts and alert history are never licence-gated, in any state: not during the trial, not after it, not if the licence file is corrupted. Two tests in the build fail if the alert pipeline or the toast service so much as imports the licensing code.
- It does not record. No timeline, no playback, no stored video. Your console keeps doing all of that, and Camural does not replace an NVR.
- It has no cloud side. No Camural account, no relay, no analytics, no licence server. Reaching your cameras from outside your network needs a VPN you set up yourself.
- No two-way audio, and it will not answer your doorbell. It tells you the doorbell rang and shows you who is there.
- On Windows, camera windows and the wall pause over Remote Desktop, on purpose. Alerts keep working.
- On Windows it conflicts with Wallpaper Engine and Lively. Two apps cannot own the wallpaper layer at once, so use one or the other. Placed camera windows and alerts are unaffected either way.
- It is not affiliated with Ubiquiti. Support comes from the author, not from them.
Windows: Windows 10 version 1809 or later, or Windows 11, 64-bit x64 only. Not Windows on ARM, and not 32-bit. 4 GB of RAM, 8 GB recommended. Any DirectX 11 GPU that decodes H.264 in hardware, and one that decodes H.265 if you want a wall of live cameras to be comfortable. 1 GB of free disk.
Mac: an Apple silicon Mac, M1 or later, on macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer. There is no Intel build and no Rosetta build.
Either way: UniFi Protect 5.3.38 or newer, which is the first firmware to expose the official integration API and so a hard floor. Update well past it if you can, to Protect 7.1.83 or later, or 6.2.72 on the 6.x line, with UniFi OS 5.1.19. Your computer has to be able to reach the console, on your own network or over your own VPN. The full requirements tables are on the compatibility pages for Windows and Mac.
You also need an API key that you make yourself on the console, under Settings, then Control Plane, then Integrations. That page is hidden from limited accounts, so you need a Super Admin or Owner account, and the key is shown once. A key made at unifi.ui.com is a different, cloud-side key and will not work. The key has to be able to write as well as read, because Protect will not serve a stream for a camera with no RTSPS stream enabled, so Camural enables one the first time that camera plays live video. Driving a PTZ camera live and saving a new preset need a local console username and password as well, which is also what lets Camural find your PTZ cameras and name their saved positions. Every write it makes is listed on the compatibility page, along with the full requirements table.
Install it, press Find or type your console's address, confirm the certificate fingerprint Camural shows you, then paste your API key. Nothing is sent to the console until you have confirmed that fingerprint.
The full walkthrough, with every window pictured, is the manual, for Windows and for Mac.
$14.99 in US dollars, once. One licence covers one person on every computer they own, Windows or Mac, and it is verified offline against a key built into the app, so there is no activation server and nothing that can withdraw it later. Stripe is the merchant of record, so Stripe is what appears on your card statement, and it handles tax, invoices and refunds within 30 days.
The trial is 14 days with nothing held back, and it needs no card and no sign-up. The clock starts the first time Camural reaches one of your consoles, not when you download it, so a week spent finding your API key does not cost you a week of trial.
What changes when the trial ends:
- Alerts and alert history keep working, and always will.
- Camera windows on the desktop go from as many as you like to one at a time.
- The camera wall on the wallpaper switches off.
- The PTZ controls stop moving cameras. Stopping a patrol already running still works.
- Your settings, layouts and per-camera rules are kept either way, and come back the moment you enter a key.
Email support@camural.com, or open an issue here. Both reach the same person.
Include the version from the top of the tray menu on Windows or the menu bar menu on the Mac, your
operating system version and your Protect version, and attach the log. On Windows it is in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Camural\logs; on the Mac it is in ~/Library/Logs/Camural, which Console.app
opens. The log records what Camural did, and never your API key, your console password, your stream
credentials or your camera images.
Camural plays video with libmpv, used unmodified under the LGPL v2.1 and
dynamically linked. On Windows the unmodified, replaceable libmpv-2.dll ships beside the
executable. On the Mac, libmpv.2.dylib and the FFmpeg libraries beneath it are built by us from
upstream source in their LGPL configuration and sit in Camural.app/Contents/Frameworks, where you
can replace them. The full licence text is installed alongside on both, and the remaining
third-party components and their licences are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md: in the
installation folder on Windows, in Camural.app/Contents/Resources and at the root of the disk
image on the Mac.
UniFi® is a registered trademark, and UniFi Protect™ a trademark, of Ubiquiti Inc. in the United States and other countries. Camural is an independent product, written and supported by Seth Walker trading as Walker Computers, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Ubiquiti Inc.