I have been coming to this subject for a long time. I want to install a security camera (or more), but need CONTROL over it. I don’t want to connect through a third-party chinese mobile app that barely works. Wendell has been on the issue at some instances, but his last suggestion was to get a commercial brand camera, and firewall it through my router. So,
Which camera would you suggest that is good bang-for-buck (good image resolution, good night-time quality), preferably PoE, and offers an RTSP stream that I can pipe to my local network (motion eye installation, or just show it on-screen)? I got tired of looking for custom firmware for such devices, because no projects seem advanced enough for recent enough models. I am leaning towards the hikvision brand, but they have a gazillion models, which leads me to believe that a lot wil reach EoL very soon after purchase (should I care? I only need the RTSP stream). What do you think? Any input is useful. How do you go about this issue?
If you want to suggest some other feature that you think is important please do so. Maybe there’s something I didn’t know I needed.
Pretty much any Amcrest camera has all the features you want. I have used them extensively on both residential and commercial deployments. They are still Chinese cameras so best practice is a either airgapping them or a separate vlan with no communication with the WAN or anything else. They are very cheap for what you get though.
For an NVR Synology is great but it is a proprietary software that requires Synology hardware. I am currently using Frigate+Coral TPU which seems to work well.
I’m going to second the Amcrest suggestion and also throw Reolink in the arena. They’re both pretty low cost/high features, and as stated above, once you’ve isolated them and the host machine, the issue of originating overseas is largely resolved, if you wanted to go further I believe there is alternate firmware you could load them with too, but I haven’t felt the need to go that far.
I currently have several Reolink cameras hosted by a Seeed Studios Reserver (thanks Wendell for the idea), super low power draw but plenty of RAM and compute for 4k feeds.
I’ve heard good things about frigate but I personally use Blueiris, set up with CodeProjectAI for facial recognition, license plate and object detection and it works a treat.
extra note: The Smarthome Hookup on YouTube has a lot of videos on home security camera, NVRs, software, and is an excellent resource
Almost any IP camera does. To my knowledge every reolink and amcrest camera supports rtsp. If you’re really concerned about it then read the user manual’s/documentation.
I like the Annke NC800 camera. It is very cheap for its good image quality, shadow quality, and it has color nightvision which is awesome. I dont trust the app they have, like with most chinese cameras, but I have them on a VLAN with no internet access. I also have the PC they stream to (BlueIris software) on that same VLAN and only give it internet on a schedule to do updates and then back to blocking. I havent done this myself with BlueIris yet, but you can set it up with an “AI” plugin that does smart detection of vehicles. You can find tutorials on Youtube. That plugin setup has been on my todo list for a while now.
I just looked and the price has gone up, we paid $125 for each of ours on Amazon.
