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Comment by bennyg | Hacker News Reader

What _are_ the best wired cam/local storage solutions today?

No one has mentioned Frigate. It has taken the "homelab"/selfhosted world by storm & utterly dominates. Open source, works great, & by far some of the most sophisticated detection/triggering schemes one can acquire, period. https://frigate.video/

I have two Hanwha units I never got around to using at my last place. H.265 IP streaming out. Onvif is the main standard everyone seems to use for streaming out.

From a DIY relatively easy perspective most NAS box (Synology & QNAP) come with "Surveillance Station" type software that handles network cameras and ring buffer storage of footage with addons for { motion detection | face recognition | alerts ( SMS | text | email ) | etc. }

The consumer boxes typically have something like Two Cameras Free (flat rate one time fee for each extra camera ($50 each for Synology)).

I believe (but haven't recently checked) that FreeNAS | TrueNAS setup's likely come with open source camera software .. YMMV.

eg: (first hit) https://dongknows.com/synology-surveillance-station-review/

The NAS advantage is you can have a single central home NAS box doing home storage and camera footage storage - disadvantage (of single box) is having camera footage "seized" by police or intruders in event of incident, yada yada ya.

I should know more but I still use software I wrote years back for handling images & footage from exploration geophysics craft ( cars | boats | airframes ) because "it was sitting about and worked".

Reolink is fairly inexpensive but their apps are pretty lacking.

Unifi Protect is my go-to because of usability but does (somewhat) rely on their SSO cloud login. All stored locally though on purchased NVRs and their app is soooo much better than Reolink's.

Reolink periodically phones home ... to China.

Anything will phone home eventually if connected to internet. Home cameras should not be connected to internet regardless if they use wifi or wire.

Reolink outside camera’s are too cheaply build. I have several and most have been replaced within a year. I am looking for alternatives that are built better.

I attest to reolink, have used it for security, 16 cameras, 3000 miles away, for ~2-3 years. Setup includes UPS on everything. Has been very stable. It even has a pretty easy to reverse engineer cgi-bin API (and very insecure) but sadly my ISP plugged the firewall hole I made for that :(

I have in some cameras had issues with connectivity but as far as I can tell, it's from using an indoor ethernet cable outside... and the RJ-45 end-of-cable wire threads literally dissolve into dust from the moisture... but that's not on the camera

For me synology works well. I purchased nice and somehow cheap reolink cameras and cut internet access for them.

Depends on how much you want to spend, though some low price units often hit well above their weight, it seems.

It also depends where you stand ethically - for example, Hikvision often makes great stuff, but they also literally built a camera with an AI built-in that identifies Uyghur people and triggers an alarm if it does.

The Hook Up does reviews heavily focused on image quality, and setup/installation, both physically and network/software wise. He often covers a wide range of price points instead of just focusing on cheap stuff or expensive stuff, and does image tests in daylight, nighttime, stationary, moving, license plate and person, etc. Even does edge-of-the-lens tests to find cameras that have crappy lenses.

The current 'hotness' would be low-light color cameras; sensors have gotten good enough that some ambient light will do, and the color helps with IDing people's clothing, and cars. Potentially license plates, too.

Most current review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3G_2zVu3cU

He's also done probably one of the most technically competent reviews of LED light bulbs I've seen in ages.

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