A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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 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.
Not 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.
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:
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=true
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'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.