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!
Reolink cameras look like they check all of your boxes. They can be self contained systems with a “recorder box” (actual term is NVR) that you keep on your property out of harms way or it can be a DIY PC with a program called Blue Iris. There is a variety of cameras to choose from with different features like Wifi, POE, PTZ, solar powered, etc. Spend as little or as much as you want. As you mentioned in your post, this will be pricey up front but will be cheaper in the long run.
Reolink is a Chinese company. Not known for their privacy. My experience with their cameras is the quality is meh and their software is even more meh. It amazes me how often they get recommended. I guess it’s due to their cheapness.
Their quality is adequate for the price and they are open enough to be used with any NVR.
If you are worried about privacy you should segment the cameras onto their own network (VLAN) or at the very least block them on the firewall from accessing the internet, which you should do anyway.
It’s more because they provide an ONVIF interface or an RTSP stream that makes them self-hosting darlings. Them being Chinese white-labels and cheap is mainly a side-bonus.
What are your recommendations if not them?
You’re not wrong about reolinks, amcrest, hikvision, etc but their price:quality can’t be beat and they work well with many different NVR software suites, which makes them popular.
If you’re concerned about how they call home (they do, I’ve sniffed packets on my network to test the rumors and seen it on every one of them), you need to isolate the cameras off of the internet so they are blocked from the outside connection. This can end up being mildly tricky to very complicated depending on your network equipment, the way your LAN is set up at home, whether you want to view your cameras remotely, etc, but it’s the most cost effective long term option that is not subscription/cloud based.
I use blue iris on an old computer. It works great. I have unifi network gear, and I tried some of their cameras out but they’re not really ONVIF compliant and they’re extremely expensive for an equivalent Chinese brand. That’s the made in USA price, and tbh Unifi cameras aren’t even that expensive, they’re more “prosumer” for small business deployments or nerds at home. They have a walled garden ecosystem that I dipped my toe into and didn’t care for some of it, but I still use their access points, routers, and switches because they’re great quality and really easy to config.
But, if you have never done any of that, you might just want to go with an off the shelf solution or be willing to spend a lot of time reading. You DON’T want to mess up your network security trying to install local cameras if you’re not sure what you’re doing.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is an RF/analogue camera kit. It’s not as easy to set up as POE (two cords to each camera and they’re way bigger so running them through walls will do more damage that you have to patch later) you can get an all-in-one NVR+4/8/12/16 etc camera kit with as many bells and whistles as you want. It will be cheaper as well and you don’t have to worry about network bandwidth issues because it’s analog. The feeds are super nice.
While Reolink hardware is perfect for Blue Iris and other self-hosted solutions, I try to warn everyone that Reolink’s own Android app now captures your device’s clipboard whenever accessed. The same may be true for their desktop or iOS apps, I don’t know.
I have several Reolink cameras and I’ve been happy with their overall image quality and capabilities, but I do not trust their software whatsoever and recommend keeping them isolated from the internet entirely.