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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

It’s cool and I get that there’s a certain element of hacker mentality, but given the seriousness of the use case, all I can think of is why?

Do you really want to rely on some firmware hack of a shitty D-Link camera to be the only thing standing between a robber and your stuff? You can buy a proper IP cam from Amcrest, Dahua or TP-Link for a few hundred bucks, wire it into PoE and have at least a fighting chance of identifying who stole your stuff. Anything less than a high quality camera placed in exactly the right place, and all you will accomplish is snapping a really blurry picture of your things being stolen, speaking from experience.

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Unless a Nest camera is trained in Ninjitsu it’s not going to do a damned thing to stop a robber from stealing anything. Cameras are for monitoring spaces, in the best case recording someone doing something bad in enough detail it can be used in court if they’re caught. So long as the quality is decent and the camera successfully records an event, there’s little difference between a hacked D-Link or Nest camera in terms of functionality.

No difference in functionality, but in one case a manufacturer provides the desired product, in the other case a manufacturer actively pushing a non-desireable product to the market earns money. Which probably isn't the message we should be sending. There cannot be enough blog posts to offset that.

His entire point is "as long as the quality is decent".

I think he's right - low quality CCTV will just tell you what you already knew - your stuff was stolen by a man of average build wearing clothes.

I've got some Nest cameras, the actual quality isn't much better than a shitty old D-Link camera I have. The Nest cameras have decent sensors but tiny primary lenses so there's a lot of pre-filtering before the video is even encoded. Fine details get blurred to shit if you actually try zooming on something like a license plate or logos.

The main difference I've noticed with the Nests vs older shittier cameras is their lenses have wider fields of view. So while the sensors have more pixels they're just picking up more background details vs more subject details. It lets them to have less precise positioning/aiming to cover a target area but they do t give you necessarily more detail on any individual part of the frame.

Do you know which amcrest camera products work with zoneminder/frigate/etc?

All “real” CCTV IP cameras work with any NVR.

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