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?
For the cameras themselves, if you would be interested in DIY solutions and have some old spare Raspberry Pis around, you can turn them into streaming IP cameras and have some control over what camera specs and lenses you use. I can’t tell you how they compare to purpose-built cameras though.
Make sure any cameras you get are ONVIF compatible. That’ll give you the widest usability.
And while it’s great to be self-hosted, I’ve never found anything as good as BlueIris for camera software, even if it does cost $50/yr. I run it in a Dockurr/windows container, there’s a few projects out there that make Dockur easier to set up.
Slightly off topic and something I read from somewhere else, but make sure whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn’t usable for any police / insurance claims.
I’d guess all systems do this now, but just wanted it to be on your checklist of features.
If the camera doesn’t do it, then the storage server must.
(And make sure the clock is sync’d to something 😉)
whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn’t usable for any police / insurance claims.
Weird. I mean, could you just access the properties of said picture to reveal the date taken?
Meta data could be edited/unintentionally overwritten
Sure, but the same is true for embedded timestamps. Just put a black bar over it with the time and date in white. Claim that the system does it that way, done.
Noted, good point, thanks!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 peer-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.
Sure, but I’ve tried Frigate, and it’s not even close to Reolink in terms of ease of use. It was a giant pain in the ass to get it working to detect people in the camera. And even then, getting a push notification is something I couldn’t even figure out. And using it on a phone is really bad UX.
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
Thanks, never heard of it, do have an old Wyze cam or two lying around too.
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.
Came here to suggest this. Glad its getting the exposure it deserves
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.
New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.
Thank you!
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.
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.
This is a good point, I actually made that mistake once! It required their app to setup.
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.
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 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
It displays fine by default, but the image only updates every several seconds. I’m talking about a live video feed, which needs some kind of special frame which has to be bolted onto HA somehow.
you managed to get it in realtime though? may i ask how?
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
I haven’t, that’s the problem. It seems like it’s possible, but I’ve given up trying for the moment.
When I needed this I reached for whatever generic rtmp cameras were well rated. Blocked them from external access (including outgoing!) at the firewall level and used Zoneminder and some custom scripts to monitor.
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.
Can we pin one of these posts? The same thing gets asked even few days and the answers don’t change nearly that frequently
Really? Sorry, didn’t see any others going back weeks, you have a link to another I could check out?
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 [email protected] for quite a while. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.
I’m fine with repeating “I use Arch btw”
Me too (btw).
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.
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:
Thanks, looks cool, frigate certainly seems the way to go.
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.)
It would definitely be a size thing for adding Ethernet (PoE or otherwise) to small boards like these. The ones I am using are already bigger than they ought to be - the bottom half is just a glorified serial interface and power input for USB. The esp plugs into this through pin/header. If I were less lazy, they could be about half the thickness in a final product. No PoE I suppose also keeps them cheap, which is always good for me. The casings were my first ‘proper’ design and entry into resin printing.
The Tapo kit I have found to be a good balance of price, features and quality. I have a Tapo C310 mounted outdoors at another building, which has done great in all weathers. Initial setup does require the app/service last time I checked, but it can be made to serve RTSP locally after that. Very good for the ~£30 price point.
Gladly. I’ll collate a few bits later - time for work.
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.
Dahua must have improved their software. I was trying every brand of camera about 8 years ago when I setup my system. The first Dahua I bought required their ActiveX component for Internet Explorer to see the camera output from their web interface!
I agree that Dahua looked better but at the time their web interface was so bad I kept the Hikvisions.
