My girlfriend is be very interested in putting Blink (Amazon) cameras up around our property. I am not interested in paying Amazon to keep our security footage.
What I’d like to do is have motion activated internet connected cameras around the property that somehow send footage to a server (I don’t know if that’s the correct term, I’m kind of an idiot) that I keep on the property.
So I have three questions:
- is this the right forum to be asking about self hosting security footage?
- does anyone here have experience doing this and would they be willing to send some pointers my way?
- is this a feasible DIY project or am I better served paying for a service?
I’ve done a little digging into self hosting and it’s not cheap, but I think it will be cheaper than paying a subscription. And safer too, which is rad.
Thank you all!
Esp-32(or some more appropriate esp) + RPI Camera + Home assistant/Openhab
My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.
Phones and their batteries aren’t made for this. Trying to run a phone 24/7 will likely result in the phone dying very quickly and raise the chances of it exploding.
My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.
OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.
I’ve tried a few (MotionEye, Zomeminder, Shinobi) but after all that I have been loving Frigate
First of all, you can operate a fully FOSS firmware on your cameras: see OpenIPC (it needs some soldering tho). Second, you can try Frigate or ZoneMinder as NVR.
Haven’t read all. Look into home assistant and a camera that works with it (zigbee?)
https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted is a good forum
ZigBee are not designed for high bandwidth applications but +1 for Home assistant
A lot of the more modern NVR systems can be accessed from the internet. So you can use these.
Synology has security station on their NAS systems (although there is some licensing nowadays depending on model and number of cameras.
Ubiquity also offers local storage for their system, that also offers a bellcam (like ring) and different in and outdoor camera models.
Good luck!
Hell, I had a Harbor Freight system years ago that was all local (with a DVR), with an app I could view remotely.
Had to open some ports on my firewall/router, of course, so not ideal, and not what I’d recommend today.
If I still had that system, I’d use Tailscale to access it.
Thank you! I’ll check those out!
Check out the YouTube channel the hook up, dude does really great comparison vids of different camera models and brands
Another brand you might want to look into is Reolink. Whether it’s just for the cameras (with something like frigate & home assistant) or cameras and NVR combo.
On a related topic, Insecam is a website that shows live streams from insecure cameras. It’s a great example on why privacy matters in every aspect of your life, even if you don’t think it affects you personally.
I use ubiquiti cameras and nvr for this purpose, might not be open source but I keep all the footage locally, it’s easy to use and feature rich
Reolink or amcrest cameras paired with (software) frigate, blue iris, motioneye, shinobi, etc etc works fine.
Yeah i am using Blue Iris paired with Amcrest, Reolink and a few random other cameras. Works really well.
Going to bookmark some answers here.
I have been using Reolink RC-522s outside in the harsh Canadian cold winters. Even at -40 they kept working and their quality hasn’t degraded.
I tried out q few options for NVR software, and I’ve settled on Frigate NVR, it was pretty painless to setup and “just worked”.
Shinobi I found worked at first but three times it shit the bed, silently failed one day, and just stopped working. I’d wipe and re-install and it’d just fail after awhile. Frigate has never had this issue so far.
I use Power over Ethernet for the cameras, so i only had to run 1 single cable (ethernet) to each camera outside, no need to run high voltage which makes it way easier to install.
I use a small mini itx PC as the NVR with a 960ti installed in it for transcoding.
I have a fancy managed 48 port gigabit poe switch which is overkill for just cameras (I have tonnes of other PoE devices on my network as well justifying it), but any “dumb” gigabit poe switch will work for you, as long as you have enough ports for your cameras.
I personally use kubernetes for my machines running self hosted apps, but for most folks that’s overkill abd you can just use docker compose!
Second for Reolink. I’m just using local SDcard storage atm, but might consider something like Frigate, just hasn’t been needed yet. Got 3 cameras and 2 doorbells, all hooked into Home Assistant.
Synology has a whole ecosystem with the option to host the footage on their core NAS Products. It is pricey, thou.
Came to recommend Synology; I’ve worked on small systems (4 cameras) and large (30+ cameras). For home use you can probably get away with their smallest NAS which includes free CCTV software (Surveillance Station) which itself includes 2 camera licenses. Adding more cameras beyond those will require a one-time license purchase. While this is not the cheapest route they are easy to setup, manage and use.
Yo I was just thinking about writing something like this. I want to use WebDAV as a backend, so you can just download whatever segment you want. And I think it would be possible to put videos of events in a different directory that it doesn’t purge.
I have thought about this from time to time. I want good surveillance, but I also don’t want to lose control of the video.
I think that the solution that I favor right now is a Wyze cam V2 or similar flashed with openmiko. edit:(I had to buy wyze v2 cameras from the US on ebay to get v2 versions, user:@ashok36@ashok36@lemmy.world suggests in this comment to use v3 and Wyzemini firmware - this might do the job.)
These can be attached via USB or wifi interface to a server with zoneminder (https://zoneminder.com/) From there you could think about offsite records too and motion detection etc.
Having said this, the setup is just fiddly enough that I keep to finding myself finding other stuff to do…
edit:clarity/details
I wanted to add that while Zoneminder isn’t going to be as easy or feature-rich as some of the commercial solutions recommended in this thread, this is the only solution that you can trust will remain privacy-respecting. GPL software isn’t going to sell you out.
All that can be said about the rest is that they haven’t sold their customers out yet.
You can get yourself a raspberry pi and a few camera modules.
