Licenses (explained)

If you have installed a XProtect Essential+ system, you can run the system and eight hardware device licenses for free. Automatic license activation is enabled and hardware will be activated as you add it to the system.
Only when you upgrade (see Change the Software License Code) to a more advanced XProtect product, the rest of this topic and the other licensing related topics in this documentation is relevant.

When you purchase your software and licenses, you receive:

  • An order confirmation
  • A software license file named after your SLC (Software License Code) and with the .lic extension

Your SLC is also printed on your order confirmation and consists of several numbers and letters grouped by hyphens like:

  • Product version 2014 or earlier: xxx-xxxx-xxxx
  • Product version 2016 or later: xxx-xxx-xxx-xx-xxxxxx

The software license file contains all information about your purchased VMS products and licenses. Milestone recommends that you store the information about your SLC and a copy of your software license file in a safe place from which you can find them again. In the navigation tree, you can also see your SLC if you select Basics > License Information. You may need the software license file or your SLC when you, for example create a My Milestone user account, contact your reseller for support and if you need to make changes to your system.

To get started, you download the software from our website (https://www.milestonesys.com/downloads/). While you are installing (see Install a new XProtect system) the software, you are asked to provide the software license file.

Once the installation is complete and you have activated your licenses, you can see an overview of your licenses for all installations on the same SLC on the Basics > License Information page.

You have purchased at least two types of licenses:

Base licenses: As a minimum, you have a base license for one of the XProtect products. You may also have one or more base licenses for XProtect add-on products.

Hardware device licenses: Every hardware device that you add to your XProtect system requires a hardware device license. You do not need additional hardware device licenses for speakers, microphones or input and output devices attached to your cameras. You need only one hardware device license per video encoder IP address even if you connect several cameras to the video encoder. A video encoder can have one or more IP addresses.

For more information, see the list of supported hardware on the Milestone website (https://www.milestonesys.com/supported-devices/). If you want to use the video push feature in XProtect Mobile, you also need one hardware device license per mobile device or tablet that should be able to push video to your system. If you are short of hardware device licenses, you can disable (see Disable/enable hardware) less important hardware devices to allow new hardware devices to run instead.

If your surveillance system is the central site of a larger system hierarchy using Milestone Interconnect, you need Milestone Interconnect camera licenses to be able to view video from hardware devices on remote sites. Only XProtect Corporate can act as a central site.

Most XProtect add-on products require additional license types. The software license file also includes information about your licenses for add-on products. Some add-on products have their own separate software license files. You can find more information about add-on product licenses here: