Previously asked 2 years ago.
What are folks using these days? Reolink seemed to be a popular choice 2 years ago. I’ll start looking here.
I’ve been using Eufy (yeah, I know). Apparently, Eufy has a way to transfer clips to a NAS via RTSP. However, I’ve been seeing users complain that the transferred clips end up with degraded quality. Not great. De-great-ed.
My home server has plenty of space on it, so it would be cool if I could save clips (or all the video footage?) directly to my ZFS pool.
What do folks’ security camera setup look like?
Frigate and Reolink are a good combo. Frigate is absolutely fantastic and can detect objects, sounds, and/or save clips and recordings to your pool. There’s really nothing better imo.
The answer is probably no but I wanted to ask as a sanity check: does this setup require an internet connection after the initial setup?
My family asked me to set up security cameras at my grandmas place, which has no internet and they don’t want to pay monthly.
The idea is that family will visit and check the recordings regularely to see whether the services we hired do their job and not abuse my demented grandma.
I’m thinking of:
- a rpi/minipc that can do it’s own hotspot
- a huge ssd slapped onto it
- web interface that visitors can log into with a password
- 2-3 wifi cameras that connect to it
It doesn’t require an internet connection at all unless you want to update the firmware on the cameras 🙂 Oh, and I guess to view the web UI you’d need a LAN connection but it doesn’t need to connect to the full internet.
Can confirm, I’ve recently got some cameras and set up Frigate and it’s been great. Not using Reolink but the ones I have work well enough. I have a TPLink that I like, and a Hilook starlight camera that I am not convinced on as it doesn’t seem to have auto-exposure adjustment. Both work well for object detection, though there’s a bit of a learning curve with frigate needing to be configured via YAML for a lot of things.
I’ve also started playing with Frigate’s face detection but I don’t think the cameras are really positioned for it. It probably makes more sense for a front door camera getting a good view of the person.
I’ve also got Home Assistant picking up the frigate camera streams which works well too.
I’ve heard good things about using https://thingino.com/ https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki
There was a post 8 days ago that got quite some feedback
https://sopuli.xyz/post/34092514?scrollToComments=trueNot FOSS, and with an entry price tag, but I ditched my OPNSense firewall for a Ubiquiti UDM Pro SE router about 2 years ago and invested in 3 of their cameras plus a doorbell and love it. I previously had Blue Iris for CCTV.
The Unifi Protect app is great. Easy to navigate, great detection, and easy to store clips. There’s no subscription fees, and I get a great firewall/router alongside a CCTV package.
Oh, and you can now add 3rd party cameras to the Unifi Protect system.
Unless it changed recently if you already have 3rd party cameras, it’s all but useless for any of those features. I am using Blue Iris/amcrest cameras and when I upgraded to a UDMP I was excited to try it with the new 3rd party camera support, but I can’t really do anything but record. No detection stuff. Ended up only adding one camera and giving up.
And their cameras, are damn expensive. I have 6 cameras outside covering most of my house. Entireity, swapping over to unifi ones is not in the budget.
I suppose there’s always a catch with them opening up for 3rd party support.
I was keen to move to Unifi primarily for a doorbell. I had a Hikvision which was very temperamental, and I didn’t want a cloud based one like Ring or Nest, so believe it or not, most of my decision was made around a stupid doorbell.
+1 for Unifi Protect. Their hardware may be a bit pricey, but it doesn’t require any cloud/Internet connection and the app/interface is excellent.
I haven’t tried the 3rd party cam support, but I don’t think the price for the cameras is too outlandish for what they are and how well they’re built.
Iirc the Unifi Protect software can be self-hosted now too.
I have eight Reolink cameras. They’re awesome. Haven’t had any issues with them other than the occasional disconnect, which only lasts a few seconds.
I have a Reolink PoE camera. It’s plugged into Home Assistant, and some setting in the integration had it phoning home constantly looking for updates. I turned that off and now it only connects outside of my network to sync the time.
The camera has survived outside for a few years now, so no complaints.When I was in the same spot, the only camera that hit all the bullet points and didn’t cost a fortune were Reolink cameras
I’ve got a few Reolink PoE cameras of various ages floating around the house, including one that’s modded to take Nikon lenses. As long as you check the model you’re getting isn’t locked to using their NVRs, I’ve had no complaints.
Currently using Blue Iris 5 with a coral tpu added on, but I’d really like to get Frigate working so I can finally ditch my last windows PC.
I have some reolink and some amcrest, and I’d choose the amcrest (or dahua) any day tbh. Similar workload. Tensor and frigate for software NVR and object detection, all to a zfs dataset.
I’ve got one of the older Reolink IP cameras and the video freezes for about 10 seconds every time it switches between color and nightvision. They never even released a firmware update for it. I wouldn’t trust them for anything important.
I went with Frigate, and based on the maintainer’s recommendations and on what was actually available in Europe, I went with one of the Hikvision models.
Just make sure to completely isolate them from the internet as there are some serious privacy concerns about using them online.
I have Reolinks that I just set up. The floodlight camera needed the app to set it up WiFi, BUT I didn’t need an account. I can access my cameras using their app over wireguard. Its nice.
I’ve been satisfied with Reolink for a couple of years, and I’ll be installing another next week.
I use a hardware NVR with it’s own HDDs and it’s own separate PoE network connecting all of the cameras, but since you are using your ZFS storage you will substitute the NVR unit with something like Blue Iris. There are several options for NVR software.
Some reolink cameras (B800 for sure) scramble the encoding to lock them to reolink NVRs. I used two of them with frigate by running neolink because fuck vendor lock in
https://github.com/QuantumEntangledAndy/neolink
I had problems with the 0.6.x series but 0.5.18 ran well enough. I abandoned those cams because they would occasionally switch to sending static to frigate and locking it down.
Am also curious because I have Eufy cameras, and would like to switch at some point.
