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?
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.
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.