Hey all, just wondering if anyone has any good self-hosted security cam recs? Have plenty of space and server options, and next big thing on my list is to get rid of my battery cloud cams. They have worked well enough I guess for a few years, but really pretty slow and limited, wondering if anyone has experience with any self-hosted solutions, preferably with similar features ie: motion detection, app/webapp, maybe battery op?
I just checked out frigate, and I see it crutches on docker. Anything docker-free?0
Frigate + Reolink (or actually Frigate-approved cams)
Amcrest seems to be the cheapest and I have good experience with them and Frigate
Can we pin one of these posts? The same thing gets asked even few days and the answers don’t change nearly that frequently
For non cloud cams, someone posted here a while back about thingno firmware, takes cheap cams off the cloud. Works great on a wyze cam and was a gamechanger for me. Sttrroonngglllyyy recommend
I had never heard of this so went looking. Super useful stuff here!
A link for anyone interested: https://thingino.com/
I see it supports many cameras, but you need to pull them apart and use a serial hookup to flash the firmware… but for the wyze cams and a few others you can flash them directly with an SD card.
I liked how cheap the wyze cams were but desperately wanted to get them offline. This was my silver bullet.
Oh thank god. This solves my problem of no good integrated cam hardware on the market that isn’t cloudified or a huge security hole.
New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.
Thank you!
I have a Reolink PoE camera. It works fine. As far as I can tell, it only uses the internet to check for updates and set the time, but I have it blocked off anyway. Home Assistant was actually causing it to check for updates, too, so that got disabled.
I don’t record, so I can’t help you there.
I will say that is a pain to get Home Assistant to display real-time video instead of a slide show.that’s weird i have some reolink cameras and they display fine through home assistant
you managed to get it in realtime though? may i ask how?
I haven’t, that’s the problem. It seems like it’s possible, but I’ve given up trying for the moment.
Frigate is popular.
I used to use ZoneMinder, it worked well, but you must be very familiar with onvif, primary/secondary channels, and key frames for it to work well.
I only switched to frigate because of the person/animal detection. It’s ok, but it does need some polish in a few areas like event retention, and it could stand some more approachable documentation.
For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.
WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.
Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.
A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor:
Dahua and Hikvision have great cameras but of course you shouldn’t trust them. Block them at the firewall. I bought mine a few years ago and preferred Hikvision for its better built in webserver for initial configuration.
On the hosting side you run Frigate, Zoneminder or BlueIris (Windows) to control the cameras and record their streams.
Any cam with an rtsp stream is fine. Host frigate on your server point it to the cams you can get audio and video and object detection pretty easily. I also recommend taking an extra step and creating a firewall rule to block the cams’ inbound/outbound internet traffic.
