I've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use?
Here's what I found.
If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local.
Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones).
You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp"
Anyway, here's some wansview firmwared cameras
https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP $14
https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 $18
https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD $17
https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM $12.5
There's probably more
You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag.
If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good.
It's the only vendor I've found that does this.
This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do.
It seems just as risky picking from a bunch of white labeled chinese knock-off type cameras, who knows whats running on them.
These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras.
They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles.
If not I'll contact Wansview.
In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them so who knows, maybe wansview is the win here.
I'm totally open to nice things being cheap.
[0] https://ui.com/
Edit, update link.
i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc…
keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall.
i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory.
Yes I'm still bitter.
This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors.
So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces.
Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal.
[edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate.
[edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses.
I have a unvr and protect and nothing runs through their portal, I connect directly to the ip address of the unvr. You can cut internet access off on the vlan and everything works fine.
They're the only subscription things I've seen if you have your own controller.
I haven't seen that writing on the wall yet, Unifi are one of a select few tech companies I trust.
* Apple says it’s end-to-end encrypted. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that they can’t view it.
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-homekit-secure...
Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years.
All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions.
Maybe it is just me and I have nothing left to loose, but the idea of people needing this surveillance is baffling.
It has been useful to me when traveling to be able to see a package on my porch and text my neighbor to grab it for me.
It works with cheap, generic IP cameras over RTSP. It's pretty easy to get it working with a Raspberry Pi too.
I was using the synology surveillance app, but after their recent shenanigans, I wanted something I could self host and modify on my own.
I'm using it at my property with 14 cameras right now and I'm really happy with it. There's still some work to do, but it's integrated with ML object detection, and even integration with a VLLM to describe a scene when certain things are detected.
This was my first attempt at a large-scale application that is heavily AI assisted. I need to update the screenshots and feature list for the readme, but if you have any questions or want to get involved, let me know.
I run frigate for some interior cameras (cheap esp32s) to watch my 3d printer, etc. It's been stable and easy to use for me, but I can't comment on using it for actual surveillance.
But the goal posts are always moving so you have to be prepared to abandon and move on.