Your cameras. Your Mac. Your footage.
Guardly is planned as a private video recorder for your home IP cameras. It will record and detect motion locally, alert you by email and let you check in from any browser — without a cloud account or a monthly fee.
Privacy
There is no Guardly cloud. That’s the point.
Most home camera systems upload your life to someone else’s servers. Guardly is planned to keep camera streams, passwords, motion analysis, events and recordings on the Mac in your home.
Planned Guardly is in development. Everything on this page is planned and may change before release.
Recorded on your Mac
Streams, motion analysis, events and recordings are planned to stay on your own disk. Nothing will be uploaded to VolMa.
Passwords in Keychain
Camera and web-access credentials will be stored in the macOS Keychain, never in plain files.
Remote access you control
A built-in HTTPS server is planned to serve the web interface. Your router, firewall and port forwarding stay in your hands.
Alerts through your mail server
Optional email alerts will go out through the SMTP account you configure — not through a third-party relay.
Setup
Finds your cameras for you.
Guardly is planned to discover ONVIF cameras on your network and walk you through adding them. Anything else will connect with an RTSP address. H.264 and H.265 streams are planned, and camera passwords will live in the macOS Keychain.
Recording and motion
Catches the moment before the moment.
You will be able to record continuously, on a schedule or only when something happens. Guardly is planned to detect motion on your Mac — or use your camera’s own motion events — and keep the seconds before and after, so every clip tells the whole story. Old footage will be cleared on the retention schedule you set.
Remote viewing and alerts
Check on home from any browser.
Guardly will include its own secure web interface. Open it in Safari or Chrome on your phone or laptop to watch live, scrub the event timeline and replay recordings. Email alerts will arrive with frames from the camera and an authenticated link straight to the event.
Built for Apple silicon
Does the least work possible. Recording always comes first.
For every browser viewer, Guardly is planned to pick the cheapest way to deliver the picture, so a Mac mini can run several cameras quietly around the clock.
Remux
Will repackage a compatible stream for the browser without re-encoding a single frame.
Use a substream
Will switch to the camera’s lighter secondary stream when it fits the viewer.
VideoToolbox
Will transcode on the Mac’s media engine when a conversion is really needed.
Bounded fallback
Software transcoding is planned as a last resort, with strict limits so recording never suffers.
Runs for months without a thought.
Multi-camera live view
Will show every camera at once; how many you run will depend only on your Mac.
Event timeline and export
Will let you jump between events, play back recordings and export clips to share.
Camera overlays
Planned per-camera name, date, time and custom text on the picture.
Watchdog
If anything goes wrong, a macOS watchdog will restart Guardly automatically.
Health notifications
Will tell you when a camera goes offline or the disk runs low — before you need the footage.
Backup, restore, uninstall
Will let you move your settings to a new Mac, or remove Guardly completely from inside the app.
Requirements
- System requirements
- macOS 12 or later · Apple silicon
- Cameras
- ONVIF discovery or manual RTSP; H.264 and H.265
- Remote viewing
- Built-in HTTPS web interface for Safari and Chrome
- Alerts
- Email through your own SMTP server, with camera frames
- Distribution
- Signed with Developer ID, downloaded directly from VolMa
Planned requirements and capabilities; they may change before release.
Be first to try Guardly.
Guardly is in active development. Join the early-access list and we’ll invite you to the first test builds.
Questions
Do I need a subscription or a cloud account?
No. Guardly is planned to run entirely on your Mac, with no Guardly cloud service to sign up for.
Which cameras work with Guardly?
Cameras that support ONVIF or provide an RTSP stream in H.264 or H.265 are planned to work, which should cover most current IP cameras.
How do I watch when I’m away from home?
Guardly will serve a secure web interface from your Mac. You decide how it is reachable from the internet through your own router and firewall settings.
Does my Mac have to stay on?
Yes — Guardly will record on the Mac it runs on, so a Mac that stays powered, such as a Mac mini, will work best.
When will Guardly be available?
Guardly is in active development. Join early access — test builds are planned, and you will hear about the release first.