I’m looking at dusting off my motion setup. It was an old setup to monitor what my pets are doing in the house with a webcam.
However, I need cameras outside to monitor my gardens and the webcams are not really usefull for that (for one, the’re not waterproof and USB cams)
I try to look for stand alone cameras, but can’t find a good test of them. (probably user error) Any tips on good, safe, cameras for outside? (pref poe, wifi when it can’t be avoided, not battery powered)
Thanks in advance
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HASS Home Assistant automation software NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PoE Power over Ethernet
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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Cameras are one part of the puzzle, but what are you planning on doing with what they output? If you want anything more than just instantaneously viewing what they can see, and you want to avoid their software then you’ll need an NVR or similar - I can heartily recommend the open source Frigate, which plugs nicely into Home Assistant (which if you’re not using yet, you may want to investigate further)
I currently have Frigate and an NTP server running connected to my main network and a camera VLAN which means the cameras can only talk to Frigate or my NTP server to keep the time in sync (or each other if they were desperate!) and currently a mixture of Annke & Reolink POE cameras, along with a couple of temporary Cinnado PTZ WiFi cameras for internal use whilst we’re away overnight to keep an eye on the cats, reflashed with Thingino as mentioned by another poster - I chose them as a gateway as they were dirt cheap and one of the easier ones to get Thingino onto, some require more extensive surgery. The WiFi for them connects onto a dedicated SSID on my camera VLAN.
When you start looking into it, there are lots of rebadging at different price points, like a variety of consumer electronics - the Annke ones I have are rebadged Hikvision at a lower price point, Loryta and Empiretech are Dahua rebadged etc.
I want to use Motion, as stated.
Ah apologies, I wasn’t aware of Motion in that context so didn’t twig that was the NVR!
Thingino makes sure your cameras are yours and no one elses, they have a list of cameras that work with it:
https://thingino.com/This seems awesome. I have a couple Eufy cameras I don’t use anymore due to their cloud connection and Eufy’s past security incidents. At least one of my models appears to be supported. Those flashing instructions seem rather complex though. If you have any pointers, let me know. I’m still going to give it a shot later. Thanks for sharing.
I haven’t done it myself but Eufy cameras seem to be among the easier ones to flash. :)
https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki/Camera:-Eufy-E220-‐-Ingenic-usb-firmware-installation
Didn’t know this existed. Gives the flexibility to choose between different Hardware Vendors.
But do you have any experience on how easy it is to flash this to the Hardware and how good it works?
I flashed 3 Wyze cam 3s in like 15 minutes. I have 2 of them running 24/7 at the moment. They’ve been running for about a year now I think?
Reliability is generally good, I think I had to restart one of them once. One minor issue I found was it sometimes sucks at detecting low light. Not sure if its just an issue on the wyze cam.
Basically it will be pitch black and randomly decide to switch from night vision to non-night vision making the feed unusable for a bit.
Thanks sharing your experience! Does it also support the 2-way Audio of these cameras?
That I don’t know.
I’ve had a good experience with Reolink PoE cameras. They do RTSP and ONVIF and integrate well with Homeassistant.
Reolink + Frigate + Coral + Home Assistant has been the greatest setup of my self hosting career.
Yeah, that’s what I’ll go with in my house, with frigate in HASS and a Coral TPU.
I think coral is not current and hard to get but I don’t watch too closely. Seems to still work! Reolink on camera detection is decent enough for me.
I had the coral already, and for the purpose it works pretty well. Still have to see how well it handles 11 cameras. The reason I need the TPU is because the recognition is done by frigate, not by the camera.
Reolink, Amcrest, and Eufy (only for their newer PoE line, they have a nice multi-lens feature and on-device processing for identification).
Thanks, I’ve targeted the Reolink TrackMix P760 (white) of the one on their own site (black, but at discount). Colour doesn’t matter to much (house is green, so it’ll not match anyway), but I’ve asked around if the colour of the lower part is the only difference (looks like it’s only that, no technical difference).
Motion should be ablt to access the camera via the rsvp uri. Haven’t found any reviews when used that way. (all on YT show the proprietary software)
Be aware that you may need to temporarily use reolink’s app to set it up first - turn on the ports, for rtsp/onvif/http(s) then you can trash the app.
I think the HA integration will use the proprietary port/api for setup and you can avoid that way too, but don’t quote me on that one, you may want to confirm first.
I have some old phones laying around, they can be used for the initial setup. The PoE connection should be completely isolated. (that’s the idea)
Wasn’t Eufy caught uploading data workout consent? Memory is a little fuzzy but I believe it was something like thumbnails being stored in an insecure cloud whether you liked it or not.
With the app, yes, if you enabled notifications with thumbnails. Using the app and giving cameras internet access is the issue there. Deleted data stayed longer than people expected, too.
The crappy generated URLs for camera access was eufy’s fault, but thumbnails in notifications from the app I would consider a user ignorance issue personally.
That said I do not ever recommend using any manufacturer’s app, or giving a camera internet access. Isolate it on a vlan, firewall it off, and use a local open source NVR that you’ll access directly.
That was my idea as well, wall the device off, don’t let it escape it’s vlan, but allow it to answer internal traffic. I want to use motion to capture activity, preferably including animals. (WAF, she likes to see what animals visit at night)
i am not sure what “stand alone” means but unifi protect is self hosted. amcrest can tie i to home assisstant
The only reason why I hesitate to recommend Ubiquiti cameras is even their cheapest offerings are kind of expensive.
And although you can run isolated from the Internet, managing updates is a bit painful. (Ask me how I know)
As a CCTV enthusiast, I do not generally recommend ubiquiti cameras unless the person wants to wholly live in the unifi ecosystem.
They’re very pricey for what you get, even though they are pretty good. They’re most often not even near the best in class despite their price, though (looking at you, doorbell camera)
They also don’t play nice with open/self hosted NVRs. It’s getting better due to consistent demand, but the reality is that they’re at their best when you use unifi protect, on unifi devices. So IMO it’s all or nothing, and since there’s a lot better value in other brands, I choose not to use them anymore.
They’re pretty user friendly, though
With “stand alone” is meant a camara you can use without suplier software (at home or in the cloud).
I just want a camera that I can use with motion. (unify has local software, but still you need their software as far as I know)
amcrest. i got it working with home assisstant
I think they mean a cam that doesn’t need to be plugged in through usb to work, like an ip camera.
They gave POE cameras that will just work with an Ethernet cable (although they gave weird POE requirements). Their USB powered ones are wifi connected.
Source: I’ve had them for years and am happy with the setup.
Reolink are easy and cheap enough.
I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.
