BantamwarePurveyors of featherweight softwareEst. 2026
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Roost app icon

Bout III · available now

Roost

Watches the yard. A single-window native viewer for your UniFi Protect cameras — no cloud, no subscription, no phone-home. Rules the roost.

Official weigh-in — Roost v1.1.3
293 KBOn disk
0Dependencies
1Process, one window
0Subscriptions

Scouting report

What it does

A single-window viewer for your UniFi Protect cameras — live RTSP pulled straight from the console, hardware-decoded video and audio, credentials sealed in the Windows vault. Every detection sits in a column down the left: click a person, a vehicle, a doorbell ring, and it plays that moment back with a scrub bar to work through it — then one tap on LIVE and you’re back to now. Narrow the column to the detections you care about, or turn on Follow Events and let the view swing itself to whichever camera just saw something. No cloud, no subscription, no phone-home.

293 KB · Win by shutout
Roost v1.1.3 · 64-bit Windows · signed · managed updates

The numbers

Roost vs. the Electron viewer

Roost against the Electron app that does the same job.

Roost
Red corner
vs.
UniFi Protect Viewer
Blue corner
293 KB
Weight on disk
Hundreds of MBElectron bundles all of Chromium
Native Direct3D 11
How it draws the video
Browser rendererChromium's compositor + GPU process
None
Runtime it needs
An entire browsera Chromium shipped per app
One process
Background footprint
Three and upmain, renderer, GPU
Instant
Cold start to a live feed
Splash, then loadboot the browser first
A camera viewer
What it actually is
A browser showing camerasthe browser does the real work
Same feeds off the same console. One of them isn't a web browser in a viewer's coat.