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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Can you link to a specific product which achieves all those things? The cheap cameras I've tried either don't support open protocols, or they want to stream your video to China, or both.

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Any cheap Hikvision or Dahua camera will usually support ONVIF. ONVIF is the key search term, if it has that it supports the standard open protocols and it'll work with most software around. Try searching it on ebay or aliexpress. Some of these do offer their own cloud too, but it's disabled by default on all I've tried so far.

A few samples:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2015-New-model-DS-2CD2135F-I...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4MP-Dahua-H-265-IPC-HDBW4431...

Heck, even my local computer store has their own branding of a cheap camera for a quite good price:

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=37_498...

I bought one of these recently and it seems to be a Dahua based firmware, full ONVIF support and available locally is pretty nice.

I have had good experience with an amcrest camera. It encourages you to set it up with their (terrible) service, but it also has an RTSP endpoint. It works pretty well with Zoneminder as well.

Edit: I also recommend checking out the Zoneminder wiki for suggestions. Here are some pages for Amcrest: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Amcrest https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Amcrest_QCam

They also have a listing here: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Hardware_Compatibility_List#Netw...

How is the security of Amcrest with where they stream and store your video? I can't find anything on their site on where the company is actually based out of. They just mention that sales in the US are sold out of the US. It's like they go out of their way to avoid answering the question of where they are headquartered.

They update it for security holes pretty regularly. I get the impression there are plenty of holes for them to fix, too.

AFAIK, you don't technically have to keep it connected to their service.

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