Comment by georgeburdell
14 days ago
I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Synology Surveilance Station [1], it supports 2 cameras per NAS for free, extra cameras $50 per device. I use an old 2 HDD NAS with 2 cameras for a few years already, it works perfectly well. (One Reolink camera, another Amcrest, both record video in h264).
[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/surveillance
This was a good answer, but Synology is making their new devices increasingly hostile towards non-Synology-branded HDDs.
Oh, I was not aware of this change. Hopefully, I just have to reject all software updates and continue running my 2 Synology NASes with cheap shucked WD drives inside.
Just use some Reolink or similar ONVIF cameras like Axis or Dahua. Block traffic from them to anywhere other than your NAS. They're pretty simple, mine have the ability to just FTP captures to a given system, and thus I've got redundant captures (on a system with a bunch of drives, and on the microsd cards in the cameras). Maybe there's some spooky backdoor crazy way they can phone home, but I doubt it given how they're PoE and access to basically every other system is locked down my firewall.
Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
I got me a hand me down...It was a Motorola and had no Internet access. All I had to do was replace the battery.
Lots of the radio baby monitors are trivial to listen in on with RTL-SDR kit.
There is such a difference between listening in from within radio range vs across the entire internet. I have basically 0 worries about the neighbors; they have their own lives.
My consumer-grade “walkie talkie” had a very short range in a city, like one block.
Had the same requirements, I used the DXR-8 PRO from Infant Optics.
I'm full Unifi. With all of Ubiquiti's faults considered. I still feel 10000000x better about it than Ring.
My fear is that we just don't know about Ubiquiti.
I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.
+1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed.
My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.
Thanks. You've answered my question about Home Assistant. I'm not familiar with Reolink and will give them a look.
I have a Wyze camera and their janky HA integration seems to have stopped working after a firmware update. They're also the epitome of enshittification and want to nickel and dime me for every feature -- I'd be glad to ditch them.
> LAN only, no centralized cloud server.
Until one day they auto-update ...
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I have a separate VLAN with its own WiFi SSID for iot things like cameras, sensors, washing machine, dryer, solar panels and a bunch of ESP32 based projects. It has no internet access, and is only accessible from my home automation server. Those devices really only need to send data to Home Assistant and expose some basic APIs to it.
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Cameras (like other iot devices) should be forbidden from going outside LAN.
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Can you use the app to talk to someone at the door if it’s LAN only?
My grandparents solved that by putting their mobile phone number on their door. They're slow to come down and open the door so it makes sense for the post person or visitor to know they're on their way
Relatively low tech compared to somehow hooking up a camera livestream system to ring your phone via the internet in some way but it works
As far as I've tried, it's fully functional if you VPN into your LAN.
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They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with
Recently replaced my Eufy system with UI ones - I’m a big fan so far. Picked up a few new 4k ones for important areas and got the rest used on marketplace via a 4-pack of 2k ones for $150 from a hair salon that had changed systems.
HomeKit Secure Video has a cloud, but it’s locally encrypted with keys Apple doesn’t have before it leaves the house. It supports a bunch of cheap cameras and doorbells (which will try to phone home, but you can block them from internet access without breaking local HomeKit).
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but great ease of use at a good price, and good privacy.
Through various different apps HKSV supports ALL cameras. :)
I use a local NVR containing a couple of hard drives totalling maybe 8TB of storage attached to same-branded cameras (ranging between $80 and $150 each) that I can access locally, and remotely via Wireguard.
I'd say it's economical in comparison to cloud options, but, yes, not all that practical to the less technical crowd.
I specifically block the camera and NVR local IP addresses from accessing the internet. I don't really want the possibility of an private company accessing live (or recorded) video of where I live.
Brand is Reolink. I've been slowly building up the system over five-ish years and have not yet found any reason to kick myself for choosing that brand. I also have some TP-Link Tapo cameras for more temporary things, like monitoring pets.
I've also setup Frigate as an alternative system, both for my own interest and as a way to aggregate different camera brands to a single interface. Frigate can be a bit complex.
Is there anything that runs for a decent amount of time, wifi and essentially all-wireless? Blink somewhat works on its own local hub, but honestly its crap for detecting when things happen so I wont be upgrading from my used 2-pack + hub even though it does integrate well with HA.
I'd really like something that'd be apartment friendly so no drilling holes.
The TP-Link Tapo cameras I have are wireless and seem to work well enough. I'd recommend to run them through frigate or some other independent surveillance software if you don't want them internet accessible.
They're quite cheap when they're on special, and Amazon seem to have specials on them relatively regularly.
(as much as I don't like to recommend Amazon for anything)
All wireless means all of your cameras can be disabled at any time by anyone with a $20 jammer off eBay.
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Best to keep Reolink stuff off the Internet anyway, and ideally in their own isolated VLAN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37586457
I also recently installed a Reolink system. I have 6 cameras (4 PoE and 2 WiFi) inside and outside my house. It’s amazing. I just set up a raspberry pi to act as an FTP server to backup files to cloud storage.
Ubiquiti's ecosystem. You own the NVR, it stores locally and they have a doorbell w/ camera.
>home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Cloudfare tunnels are free. You just pay for your domain name. Ngrok is also an option.
If you want to be extra secure, you can do ssh port forwarding through the cloudfar
Personally I'd look through the brands listed in the Home Assistant integrations, either Local Push or Local Polling :
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
The documentation for setting up the integrations should also indicate whether there's any cloud involved.
The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.
I think you would basically want to do custom firmware on your camera basically.
There's also thingino, I have not gone this route yet.
https://thingino.com/
Thanks for recommending thingino. I’ve seen couple of other projects over the years that allowed swapping out the firmware on cheap Chinese manufactured wifi cams. But thingino is the first one that has support for the cameras I actually own. I stopped using those cameras after I moved over to Unifi. But this might give some of those cheap cams a new life and can probably find some use for them.
If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.
Yes, but they have to subpoena you. That means process, that means getting a judge to sign it, and it means you can limit scope (i.e., if the incident under investigation occurred outside your home, you're not going to need to provide any footage from inside).
While the OP doesn't emphasize this detail, it says this is a tool that will allow police to request access from the camera owners. Police can, of course, also request footage from the owners of non-cloud cameras, so the legal basis of disclosure -- consent -- can exist in either case, cloud or non-cloud camera.
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You don’t have to keep your recordings for a long time. It’d be pretty easy to set up a system that only keeps records for a few days.
Good luck unencrypting my drives.
With a subopena you would be the one unencrypting your disk. Being in comptent of the court usually means imprisonment or daily fine until you comply with the court order.
There exist third party firmware for $10-20 cameras available on Amazon.
Install that and your open source backend of your choice and Bob's your aunty.
There's lot's of generic NVRs and cameras for relatively cheap at the usual far-East retailers.
Eufy Security?
Sounds oxymoronic.