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?
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.
@jabeez@lemmy.today You could use Frigate for the ‘feature’ set, no? frigate+HA should work very well for the use case. Rest you should be okay with something that does RTSP and feeding that to frigate/HA, no? I remember researching something about this last year, and found that Reolink IIRC offers that.
Gonna throw in another Reolink recommendation. I use Blue Iris as my NVR and have both that and the Reolink integrations in Home Assistant for motion notifications and lighting control. The cameras are durable (even in my very cold temps like -30C) and have really good image quality. If you don’t have an NVR or Home Assistant, the built-in motion detection and app is still pretty good and you can just pop an SD card in for recording.
Have two Reolink doorbells in cart, battery powered and wifi (not ideal, but easy), thinking I’ll just add old HD to my router to use for recordings, and/or SD card.
If you have a powered doorbell, the Reolink cams can be powered by that too.
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.
Used Zoneminder for a 20 camera store CCTV setup and can confirm, it’s complicated but powerful. I wouldn’t use it for less than 4 cams.
The alternative I’d use personally is https://motion-project.github.io/ though. Doesn’t make much difference.
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
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.
@empireOfLove2 @Windex007 Just keep them off the network. There is no reason for a security camera to have LAN access.
How you gonna get the video feed off an IP cam and onto your NVR without connecting it to your network?
You’re not seriously suggesting using old analog cameras in 2025, are you?
Maybe they mean main network? Lots of people seem to have a separate vlan with strict rules on what they can cobtact for IoT devices nowadays due to how poorly secured they are.
Can confirm. Been using Wyze cameras for several years.
I’m not using this particular firmware but I bought them specifically because I could flash them.
Despite the firmware giving control of outbound traffic, I suggest blocking them at the network level.
Mine run on an sd card and if someone removes the sd card and reboots it or the card gets corrupted, it would fall back to factory settings.
I have quite a few of these and they are using very, very cheap sd cards and while none have failed, they most certainly will eventually.
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.
Holy sht. I know what im doing this weekend.
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.
Eh? Shouldn’t it be real time already?
this is my configuration:
- camera_view: live type: picture-glance entities: [] camera_image: camera.cam_profile000_mainstream tap_action: action: noneI am using ONVIF integration for the camera.
Mine even play audio
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.
@Blue_Morpho @jabeez Huh I preferred Dahau. Thought the interface was nicer and the cameras low light looked way better.
Frigate + Reolink (or actually Frigate-approved cams)
My amcrest cameras have been good, but hikvision has been even better. They’re sneaky though so make sure they’re on an isolated vlan.
I have 3 imou dahua chinesium wifi cameras which are working nicely. They would be even better if I could get some cable to them. I think the most important aspect is the onvif protocol, then the encoding should be standard h264 no other bullshit, then cable if possible.
I love frigate so much!
Amcrest seems to be the cheapest and I have good experience with them and Frigate
Used them before, but you have to be kinda careful with Amcrest, every once in awhile they throw one out that is especially shitty to self host.
Can we pin one of these posts? The same thing gets asked even few days and the answers don’t change nearly that frequently
Sigh, unfortunately not.
You should see the Linux community asking about which distro to use - now that’s where a pinned post is needed…
Huh? There’s a post about exactly that pinned at the tops of !linux@lemmy.ml for quite a while. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.
Well, slap me sideways with a boxed edition of Windows XP SP3.
I never knew that!
Thanks for sharing.
I’m fine with repeating “I use Arch btw”
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:
Tell me more about your homebrew esp32 cams, please!
Ok so the combination is:
- This camera board
- This external antenna
- This project
- A shell I designed myself in SketchUp (skp download). Note that’s not the final version, as I lost some design files.
And the finished item:
All assembled, they will give a decent enough feed to frigate for the basics. Just don’t expect miracles in the resolution or framerate departments. 3fps does fine for my use case of tracking critters.
Neat, thanks!
I’m not thrilled about the camera quality (compared to a purpose-built surveillance cam with 4k and good low-light performance) and I wish it had PoE, but damn, can’t beat that price!
(Side note: does anybody else find it weird that PoE is so uncommon and/or adds so much to the cost of these IoT dev boards? I get that normal people don’t want the hassle of running cable, but it feels like the hole in the market is bigger than it should be.)
I just checked out frigate, and I see it crutches on docker. Anything docker-free?0
This is maybe controversial, but I love the Ubiquiti security stuff. Cameras (interior and exterior) doorbells, etc, it’s all great. Pricey, but you get what you pay for.
And the data can stay local or be accessible via their services.
I chose to go local only, grabbed their UNVR and populated it with 4x 2TB drives and it has enough space to handle 7 cameras HD history for about a month.
I’ve experimented with ubiquiti cameras and for the most part I find them very overpriced for their quality point. They’re good cameras, but they’re not ONVIF compatible so if you want to get into their (super overpriced and limited) ecosystem you won’t be able to intermix other cameras easily.
A good example is their doorbell camera. It’s just not good. And they don’t have more than one model, so if you want a good one you’re buying something else, that won’t work in their software, so now you’re using two systems to watch your cameras.
I’m glad they work for you, but I don’t recommend getting into their camera ecosystem.
UniFi Protect now has limited ONVIF support allowing various 3rd party cameras to work with Protect.
UniFi cameras can have RTSP enabled also, but it requires UniFi Protect to enable the setting.
requires UniFi Protect to enable the setting.
Always some sort of cloud based dicking around with Ubiquiti stuff. I’m so over them.
Unifi Protect is what runs on the CloudKey/NVR physical device - you don’t need to have it go through to the Internet.
Remember, for better or worse Ubiquiti is positioning themselves as SMB Enterprise security - some companies won’t want their footage to be accessible outside their network.
You can self host Protect. It’s what I did for ages when I was using a few of their cameras. Don’t have to use cloud unless you want to.
There’s a lot of downsides to ubiquiti (I’ve been dunking on them all over this thread) but there’s a LOT of great stuff too, and being able to self-host their management suite if you choose to do so is GREAT. That doesn’t make me want to invest in their walled garden for cameras, but for people who want to get into a functional ecosystem they’re a great choice. Overall the price:performance curve is not worth it to me, though, but neither are apple products, even though I know they work well also.
+1 for Ubiquiti. I’ve got a Dream Machine and 5 camera hooked up, it’s great.
Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.
Reolink camera
Nice, had heard the name, but looking at their site, didn’t realize they had so many options, and no cloud requirement! Awesome, looking like the likely option, thanks!
Be careful with reolink, their P2P solution is pretty suspicious. No body really knows how it works and who it shares the data with.
You can disable those features, but it will stop reolink app from working.
They have never explained how the prer-2-peer network works, and it security and privacy is quite unknown.
Reolink is Chinese, which doesn’t really help these concerns.
Better to selfhost frigate and just rtsp cameras there.
I would assume it’s based on TURN or STUN, since you don’t need to log in. What makes it suspicious?
Edit: I did some reading on their blog, and they only mention something like STUN and specifically say it’s only for connection, not for relaying, so I don’t think they use TURN. In that case, the camera is streaming video directly to your phone, so it sounds like it’s not ever passing through a ReoLink server. The benefit to ReoLink is they only have to run a STUN server, which is incredibly cheap (bandwidth wise), and the benefit to you is that the video never goes through anyone else’s server. The drawback is if you have a really restrictive firewall, or some funky address translation, you might not be able to establish a connection.
The problem is that it can only be speculated how they work, because they have not published it. That is quite suspicious in my book.
I personally would avoid reolink and use rtsp + frigate + ha, to have full control with known open source selfhosting solution.
I understand that people like the easy setup, but if you already do selfhosting, it isn’t that big jump.
I had 2 of these for years ran back to Synology surveillance station and they were great. I’ve expanded to 6 cameras now and bought the Reolink NVR. It works great, with good picture quality. Pretty inexpensive setup overall. No downtime. Very happy with Reolink.
I recently added two reolink cameras to my setup. Out of the box, they would not let me assign them IPs, they did not even try to get an IP from my network. They needed to be connected to via the mobile app the first time, then reconfigured for IP. Wasn’t a great user experience even if the cameras are now fine.
Onboarding a networked device should not require a mobile app, fill stop.
How would you connect them to your network? They have no inputs.
Well shit I wish someone would have told me that before I directly connected them to my switch via Ethernet.
They’re PoE, rlc-520a. They absolutely have inputs.
Oh ok. I was thinking wifi. Yeah, that’s strange that they won’t work with direct ethernet.
But you still kept the cameras and didn’t return them… Where’s the full stop? lol
Well I certainly won’t be buying anymore, and I’ll be letting anyone who asks know about my shitty experience, but yeah, you’re right. Partial stop.
I tried to use Shinobi as my PVR for a while but dealt with a lot of usability and stability issues. Switching to Frigate has been much better. Configuration can be a bit difficult but it’s rock solid and really great. Plus the home assistant integration is top notch. I’ve had a lot of luck with Amcrest cameras and also managed to use a cheap Tapo camera within my setup.
I have Amcrest PoE cameras hooked to an Amcrest NVR for 24/7 recording and also Frigate running separately tied to Home Assistant to record clips and send notifications when people are out front/back of my house. It all works really well thus far after about a year of use.
Nice, checked them out, look like really nice cams, leaning towards battery doorbells to not have to deal with any wiring. Would love to have PoE, but sounds like a lot of work!
It was definitely not fun stringing Cat6 through the attic, but knowing myself, I probably wouldn’t have stayed on top of battery changes and I also wanted 24/7 recording since a battery powered camera can miss movement and start recording late or not at all. I also need a doorbell camera still but I’ve had trouble finding one that checks all the boxes.
