Hey everyone,
I am looking for some advice with helping my dad upgrade his current lorex security system. It is an older system with 4 cameras using bnc connectors. The box (recorder) died and was wondering what the best options are for the future. I feel like it would be best to move to a 4k camera system. I don’t know too much about this stuff as I am more of a regular computer user, desktop, servers, windows and linux, etc, so I don’t have that much experience with security cameras or software. I would preferably like to upgrade the cameras, probably have to get a POE switch and run ethernet cat 5e to each camera and then connect it to the server. I will look for a tutorial but I was wondering what cameras people suggest and what software do people recommend. Or should I just look for an all in one solution with the cameras and recorder box? What if I would like to add 1-3 more cameras in the future?
Thanks for your feedback and I am not sure if this was the right section to post this in. I am not really familiar with this stuff compared to building PCs and was learning linux during covid and really enjoy that. Still learning a lot, I am migrating my server to new hardware and figuring out how to do that. Was hoping to use more virtual machines and what not and hoping that the security system can go in a vm or docker or something. Thanks again
https://frigate.video/ - this is basically a proxy for camera streams that does high quality tensor flow based object detection annotations… which is probably what you want. If you’re going for half a dozen or a dozen 4k60fps 20Mbps hevc/h.265 streams, you’ll probably want to do object detection and run ML models on some kind of accelerator, either Google Coral TPU (even of USB only since you don’t need full res for most detection), or a GPU.
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Lots of really big HDDs on something like TrueNAS, so you can store video long term.
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As for typical cameras, I kind of like these NC800 as nice middle of the road cameras I feel won’t feel uselessly ancient in 2-5years.
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As for doorbell camera / intercom functionality that’ll let you talk to delivery people over the internet while not at home, I don’t know. I wish there was an easy home assistant thing for this, I’m still looking for a replacement for nest hello / Amazon ring. (It’s just two way audio and a button and a camera, why’s 2 way audio so hard?)
+1 for Frigate. It’s fairly easy to setup using Docker. You might also look into PoE cameras. This way you can plug them in and not have to worry about jamming up your Wifi and just run the video streams over standard ethernet. This has the added benefit of not having to worry as much about firmware and security issues. If you’re super privacy/security conscious you might consider blocking all internet access for the cameras at your router if it allows that. Look into firewall traffic rules for that.