The Nest Cam Outdoor is a $199 camera with an easy-to-install magnetic base
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's so horrible, in more ways than I would have imagined that a camera could possibly suck, that it's completely redefined my understanding of awful.
It's caused me to rethink many other purchases way outside of the category, from blenders to TVs to cars.
Absolutely don't ever buy a Nest product, unless your aim is to do experimental anitmaterialism therapy.
I may be mistaken, but I don't think you can downvote replies to your comments.
I genuinely did ask because I wanted to know. Even though my experience has been great, if there are say security problems I wasn't aware of or really poor customer service, I'd be keen to hear! (I'm considering buying more and would very much rather not if it's not that great, I'm a very new customer)
• Fundamentally idiotic design - can't save video except to ridiculously overpriced Nest cloud service.
• Browser UI requires Adobe Flash.
• Camera software (on both iOS and in browser) eventually will stall, showing what seems to be a live image but is actually a still image from when it crashed hours ago.
• Other times, camera view will gradually drift behind, so that what you see is actually several minutes behind real-time.
• You can set time zone, but only for regions (not many) that Nest marketing has approved, so when you take the camera on travels, its several hours off. E.g. I took it to Japan but the closest time zone I could set it to was Saudi Arabia. (WTF is wrong with these people? How is it possible to decide on that outcome when you have written a software UI to set the fucking time zone?)
• Camera hardware unit crashes every once in a while and becomes unresponsive until power yanked / rebooted.
• Completely unintelligent about returning to a previous location -- you have to do the weird bluetooth-and-QR-code dance every single time you bring the camera back home.
• If you don't sign up for the stupid $300/year cloud service, then you get ads for it in the UI.
• Die Nest, die die die die die. (Yes, I root for them to go out of business, even though that would mean that my stupid cloud-dependent camera would cease working entirely...)
There is also Nest Aware which can let you enable alerts/emails that you get when activity/motion/sound happens when you are gone (it will use your phone or other devices to detect when you leave.) You can also disable the cameras when you are home, if you are one of those paranoid people.
I am not paid or affiliated with Nest at all. I just have two cameras that I use mainly to watch my two cats. They have been great for my use. I have gigabit internet. I have not had any issues.
You know you have a problem when you have to put a wifi access point next to the camera to get it to stay online.
The smartphone software that came with the camera will frequently lock up, so it's nearly impossible to tell whether our baby is actually sleeping quietly or the image has just frozen. Ditto for the browser-based cloud garbage. I've resorted to just accessing the feed directly (via http://192.168.1.xx/video.cgi, which is a streaming jpeg) but that tends to lock up as well.
EDIT: I should mention I even bought the mydlink Camera Video Recorder (DNR-202L) and what a heap of shit. Clogged up my LAN somehow, despite the fact that dropcams have 1080p and don't have any effect. Cameras often lost connection to the DNR-202, and the quality that it could support had to be severely downgraded. D-links solutions are atrocious. Please, save yourself the money and time. The dlink stuff is cheap for a reason -- and well, not all of it is even cheap. I bought the wide angle rotating cam and it ran me $200. And it was just as terrible as the little dinky $50 dlink cameras. Ugh.
To overcome the software problems we use Sighthound to do the image recognition + storage. It's a local install on a PC/Mac no cloud needed.
One trick to note is that newer Foscam's send some telemetry stuff to the cloud but that's easily blocked with an outbound firewall rule.
There's a specification called ONVIF that most of them more-or-less implement that allows applications to discover cameras features like how to get the video stream and PTZ.
I use a Foscam 8921, which is a pan-tilt 720p camera and a Crenova something which is a 720 fixed dome. The Crenova is flaky, dropping frames but that may be because of the cable.
The foscam was ~$70 and the crenova was ~$40.
The 8921 is technically a indoor-only camera but it's lived in my chicken coop for over a year without an issue. It's away from rain but not hot and cold temperatures and dust. So it would probably work on a sheltered porch.
As far as software goes you can use an android app called "Onvifer" that discovers onvif cameras and let you view and control them. Or you can use zoneminder if you have lots of free time ;). I wasn't too happy with what I could find so I put together some hacks with ffmpeg, a setup that is slowly evolving into a custom video surveillance system.
I keep my cameras on a separate network without internet access. They all run linux and have open telnet ports. I treat them as hostile outsiders and only allow access from one machine that sucks video out of them but it's up to how paranoid you want to be.
Anyway in conclusion there are definitely low-cost options that don't involve the cloud.
EDIT: Also amazon sucks. You have no idea what you're getting when order from them with these types of products. Be prepared to return things.
http://deercam.tumblr.com/about/
The cam lasted about a year out there until it quit working after an electrical storm. It lived through a lot of rain, wind, and Alabama humidity.
That said, the subscription prices are rather insane.
The D-Link cameras, at least the ones I use, all have a cloud service available, but they work just fine if you put them on a separate network that isn't able to access the internet. They all present what they see as an MJPEG stream that motion can consume, plus they have a built in web server to do the configuration.
https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-video-camera-g3/
(Not affiliated)
The new UVC-G3[2] is rated for outdoor use, but appears to be preorder-only for now[3].
[0] https://www.ubnt.com/download/unifi-video/unifi-nvr
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/unifi-video/id964967062?mt=8
Anyone who buys this is nuts.
The only reason I went with them in the first place is that they have a very good picture and viewing range.
I've deployed them for my uncle at some of his rental properties in less desirable parts of town for the security of his tenants.
Since Nest took stewardship of the Dropcam products, there has been a noticeable decline in quality. The Nest App is not as fully featured as the Dropcam one was previously, and I seem to be having more and more connectivity issues, despite having improved Internet connectivity.
There isn't anything compelling about this new product that will lead me to "upgrade". One of my cameras is already pointed outdoors and it gets the job done for monitoring my entrances.
Oh, there's a reason for that. Fadell's leadership was so horrible that a lot of the dropcam team ended up quitting after being acqui-hired.
My current cameras meet all this criteria. They've got a cloud service available, but they work just fine even if they are unable to phone home.
* Want meaning 'not just technically capable, but who want to expend the time to set up & maintain this'
However I own 3 cameras and the fire alarm. The fire alarm, is worthless, I eventually disconnected it given the large amount of false positives. Then there are the cameras. I travel a lot so wanted a system that allowed me to monitor my home remotely for security purposes. However, I soon found out they are pretty much gimmick and any burglar will by-pass their security. If you own a nest cam, be aware that if the cam is disconnected from your Wifi, it will take 30 MINUTES FOR NEST TO NOTIFY YOU.
What did I learned? Burglars will power off the electricity in you house upon entry - to prevent alarms etc from sounding. This will bring you Wifi and your cameras down. Don't worry, 30 minutes later, or approximately 20 minutes after burglars have left, you'll know.
You'll also only be able to set notifications via email and push, so if you are sleeping you're out of luck. I was thinking of hacking a system with Twilio to do an automated call upon the email being received, but after finding out that it would take 30 minutes to even be notified I gave up.
Nest is cool, easy to setup and the cameras look nice, but they are toys. Other products might be hard to setup, look uglier but work. I'd rather they did both, but if I have to chose between ugly and works, and beautiful but doesn't - i'll take the first.
If you do this on the cloud, you can call from a cloud provider and record outside the house. Nest could easily call you from Twilio after 1 minute of being disconnected and it will achieve the same.
It's as if an alarm company said, we will notify you after 30 minutes if someone comes into you house.
Nooooooope.
stating that the fact the thief will be on video is IMO a stronger deterrent if there's one at all.
If the camera can be knocked off the base and left hanging in a position that can't see anything, then the camera is useless.
Side note: if you watched the season premiere of Mr. Robot last night, there was a scene that reminded me of Brad's video (I'll say no more for fear of spoilers)
I mean I guess not since the product is coming to market -- I just personally don't know of anyone who uses one.
It's clearly marketed to a not-technically-skilled market (the magnet is pretty brilliant - tool-free installation, if you can find a bit of metal) which probably intersects the above market to a certain extend.
I'm not sure that is entirely true. I know of several people who work in IT and use them. Any decent outdoor IP camera is going to cost at least $100 and $10/month is worth the convenience for some people.
My own experience with cameras was using a foscam IP camera as a baby monitor a few years ago. Setup was fine but the UI was horrible - very slow and filled with lag.
> My immediate thought is "security moms" ... voted for Bush... substantial segment of the SUV market.
I think the market extends beyond a stereotype. None of the other people I mentioned above voted for Bush or even have kids. Personally, I've been looking for an outdoor camera to deter the random kids we have had try to break into a hot tub in our yard and to deter someone breaking into a car parked outside. I don't have time these days to mess around with a self hosted solution so this is a potential option.
I have to recharge my Homeboy about once every two months.
* No Wires.