I live alone and my neighbor found some drunk and/or high folks trespassing on my property while I wasn’t home the other day. I want to put up cameras as a safety thing, but I hate Ring.
I’m a broke botch rn too, so the subs for the cameras or whatever can’t be crazy.
Talk to your neighbours, be part of a community
I bought eufy brand cameras for inside my home and outside. They use SD cards and the inside cameras were very affordable. The doorbell camera is wireless and was originally near $200 retail but the price on my model was significantly discounted. (Because a new model had been released?) I found it on sale for $99 at Home Depot and got Best Buy to price match. Then I used $20 in rewards points, so ultimately I only paid around $80 for the doorbell cam.
I am extremely pleased with my inside cams but the outside doorbell cam has some limitations. When connected wirelessly and without a subscription it only records in 30 second clips onto the SD card. Therefore, when I want to save or go back and look at something that took longer than 30 seconds I have to cobble it together. Then there are glitches where little pieces of the event are missing between clips. However, it’s fine for viewing in realtime remotely through the app. Also, I haven’t looked in a couple of years but when I first got the eufy cameras their cloud subscription was much cheaper than other providers, like Ring.
I did not research other outside cameras besides doorbell models, so those may be better. But I have been very pleased with my eufy models, even the wireless doorbell model with its limitations.
I have Eufy with their Homebase. All clips are stored locally, with assurances that they are not copied onto their cloud. Even though that may change, now that Anker acquired them…
Can I ask, why do you have cameras inside your house?
Mainly to check on my pets when not home. Recently I moved from a house into an apartment and it’s been wonderful to make sure the dogs aren’t barking and howling when I’m not home. There’s been a couple of times that I’ve had to go back while they’re adjusting so I don’t get evicted.
I also run eufy cameras and couldn’t be happier. Everything is stored locally and they even have this home base storage device to increase capacity of all of your cameras if you need that.
I think deer cameras are cheap?
I bought these d-link cameras - dcs-8302. A two-pack set me back $30. They do WiFi or RJ-45. There is an app and cloud subscription, but you don’t need the subscription.
They can store to an SD card, which you can play back through the app. If someone takes your camera you lose the content. The camera also serves a stream over RTSP. I run software called ‘motion’ on ny home server that captures a snippet whenever there is movement.
A dog
Depending on your location, you could get some https://www.instar.com/en_US/ cameras.
They use Sony chips and their servers are based in Europe, if you want to use the online functionality.
I wouldn’t trust anything Chinese at all, Tencent’s and TP-Link’s practices to blame. I assume it as compromized as US devices for the NSA.
Best would be to set up your own system, as others mentioned, but that takes a bit of network knowledge and you need a server and hardware for it, it will be way more expensive.
Reolink is easy to DIY, has sane privacy policies if you want to use their web services, and they support self-hosting your own streaming + recordings if you don’t.
They’re the usual rec in these threads, and with good reason.
I have a reolink doorbell and to my surprise it doesn’t require a subscription to keep recordings or view them from your phone. You just need to put an SD card in the camera. I think the subscription is only for cloud backup
No idea about their other cameras though
+1 I’m happy with my Reolink. I’ve got them blocked from the Internet and they still work. Works well with HomeAssistant, Scrypted into HomeKit (slowly), and frigate by accounts online.
So there’s no subscription? I might have to look into one. We had one from Seeing, which which we found at a bin store and figured we’d try. It worked fine, but after a year they wanted a subscription fee so we gave up on it.
The subscription is only if you want cloud backup of recordings as far as I’m aware.
Mines blocked at the router but I unblock it when I go on holiday. Can still view SD recordings. Never had any issue.
I think they offer cloud, but no, once you buy the camera you can either have it on a local server to store video which they also sell, or just have it on the local network with smartphones able to use an app to monitor it from anywhere. Or, just have them not connected, and pull the storage card when you want to see captured history (a pain, but doable). I’ve only used the lower tier, and they’re not too bad. Can’t say if the higher priced ones are a lot better or not, but they do offer a lot more features.
Basic, offline CCTV systems for starters, but those require effort to set up and may not be feasible if you’re renting your place as they require setting up cable runs.
Respect other peoples privacy. Make sure the camera only covers your own property, and not the public street or sidewalk.
Public areas are public.
you are right, public areas are public, and in public you are not recording passersby. public is not your reality show.
Fuck that! “Public” is not the same as “panopticon,” but that’s what pervasive surveillance cameras turn it into!
I have mine pointed down from neighboring houses but they do cover the sidewalk and street which can help in the event of a break-in or crash. They also run through frigate in addition to my NVR and in that I have the sidewalk and street masked off so I only get notifications for people coming on my property. This way the sidewalk and street is being recorded by not viewed unless something happens.
Look for random no-name cameras that support “ONVIF” and keep them firewalled away from the Internet.
If you want 100% control and keep everything local FrigateNVR and the POE cameras of your choice. You can find used hardware online and pick and choose where you want to spend more cash. To save space for recordings a gpu or tpu/npu can be used for object detection.
https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted is a good place to search for some information and help.
I’ve been using the Eufy Security ecosystem, which stores video locally, usually on MicroSD cards or a hub device with built-in storage. And there are zero monthly fees. It has a pretty good app for accessing everything remotely. The devices aren’t super cheap but the prices aren’t crazy either, I think they’re good products for the money.
I got like 4 for $50, I’d call that pretty cheap… 3k sensor isn’t amazing but it’s good enough for our purposes.
Eufy, they have local storage too
If you have an old PC or laptop and are willing to take time figuring things out, a basic Frigate installation is free. I run it with Home Assistant and it provides completely customizable notifications to my cell phone with no cloud storage or servers required outside of some kind of SMS or push notification account.
Lots of cameras are compatible, but for a truly cheap option, TPLink cameras ($20) can be mounted inside your windows (with a very minor modification) as long as you have dim exterior lighting at night. I have 3 of these installed and they work fine the vast majority of the time.
I’ve heard good things about Flock.
