| ▲ | noduerme 7 hours ago |
| I've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use? |
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| ▲ | kristopolous 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning. Here's what I found. If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local. Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones). You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp" Anyway, here's some wansview firmwared cameras https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP $14 https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 $18 https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD $17 https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM $12.5 There's probably more You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag. If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good. It's the only vendor I've found that does this. This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do. |
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| ▲ | Cerium 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It is not really cheap, nor best "value for the dollar", but I am extremely satisfied with UniFi [0]. Nearly instant setup, decent mobile apps, web interface, basically just works as you need. [0] https://ui.com/ Edit, update link. |
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| ▲ | noduerme 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thank you, that looks pretty good! I think the link should just be ui.com. The subdomain redirects to a login page. | | | |
| ▲ | pdonis 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So this link redirects to a page that wants me to either create an account, or log into one I already have, before it will tell me anything about this product. Sorry, no. | | |
| ▲ | jolux 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think they just posted the link they log into. The site is ui.com or store.ui.com. | | |
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| ▲ | toofy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | while i agree that unifi is worth looking at, id urge anyone reading this to be a little weery there: i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc… keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall. i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory. | | |
| ▲ | Arrowmaster 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I did a full security system replacement for my previous employer in our data center. Replaced all the old IP cameras that connected directly to a small black box nvr with UniFi camera recording onto a UniFi Video server writing to a NAS cable locked to the rack in our locked data center. Two months later UniFi Video was discontinued and stopped receiving updates or support. If we wanted a supported platform we had to purchase a UniFi Protect NVR with less storage and less power/network redundancy than what I built. Plus all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal. Yes I'm still bitter. | | |
| ▲ | noduerme 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Guh. This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors. So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces. Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal. [edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate. [edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses. |
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| ▲ | petepete 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Were you using Unifi VOIP or the enterprise Identity stuff? They're the only subscription things I've seen if you have your own controller. I haven't seen that writing on the wall yet, Unifi are one of a select few tech companies I trust. |
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| ▲ | nielsbot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Been using the HomeKit ecosystem. If you already pay for iCloud you get secure* cloud storage included. * Apple says it’s end-to-end encrypted. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that they can’t view it. https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-homekit-secure... |
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| ▲ | digiown 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Frigate and some cameras that can stream to an NVR. No cloud, you can use a VPN for remote access. https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/ |
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| ▲ | xoa 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'll second this, also adding that while it remains more of a project to setup Frigate has made significant advances over the last few years and has improved a lot. So if you previously looked at it and were put off, might be worth looking at again. Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years. All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions. |
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| ▲ | beAbU an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ubiquiti Unifi Protect. |
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| ▲ | SkyPuncher 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I just try to look for companies that are a bit smaller in the space. Some of these features only work when you have enough coverage. Small companies don't have that. |
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| ▲ | allarm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| https://reolink.com |
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| ▲ | kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If you have a spare always-on computer, Agent DVR is excellent. https://www.ispyconnect.com/ |
