I searched, but haven’t found a lot of suggestions. I am trying to get the items in security camera setup all ironed out before making any more purchases. I have a couple raspberry pi zero cameras and they are working great with HA. Although for now, they are all inside because I haven’t had time to put them in an enclosure.
I wouldn’t be opposed to buying cameras, but I’d rather have control over the storage and streaming of the cameras. I heard you could re-flash the Wyze firmware with your own, but that apparently got harder? Does anyone have any recommendations for HA-compatible cameras that give you control of storage/don’t upload your stuff to the cloud and their app?
Of course, I’m okay buying a few more Pi ZeroW’s with camera modules. Thanks in advance!
Reolink cameras can be run standalone, and there’s a HACS integration for them (which from my experience appears pretty stable). I have a couple of them and set them up to interface directly to HA without using any of the Reolink software.
Depending on the model, they do local recording (to SD card), FTP, and Email, as well as the standard streams.
Any of the well known brands that support RTSP (and/or optionally ONVIF) will give you what you want: Hikvision, Dahua, Reolink, Axis, Lorex, Amcrest (the last two are Dahua OEMs) and more. Just search for them, you’ll find plenty of reviews, there’s an incredible large choice of models for any of those. Hik and Dahua alone have hundreds of models.
Note that it’s a bad idea letting any of those Chinese cams (and they all are, except for Axis) access the internet. You should isolate them on a local only subnet for security reasons.
For sure! I don’t know how much detail you want, but I’ll tell you what gave me trouble and my solution. I’m not with my system right now, so this is from memory. I’ll update it when I get back to it.
The short version is I used Rbi-Web-Cam-Interface to work with the camera, and I used the streaming URL in a card on a dashboard just for cameras.
This is what was giving me trouble though: finding that URL was much harder than I thought it needed to be, especially coming from MotionEyeOS’ interface. But Rpiwebcam’s playback is much much smoother and I have been much happier with the switch. I believe the URL for streaming is something like: http:///html/cam_pic.php. And the browser URL to turn on motion activation etc is http:///html.
Also, if your network drops or the camera turns on, you need to manually start Motion Detection again if you plan on using it for notifications or otherwise. I suppose I could write a script to have it start on boot but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Then I use the Pushover app and a script to send me notifications when motion is detected. It’s been fantastic so far!
Ugh, you’re making me think I should just stick with Rpi0W cameras and not buy anything else…
@norman.rasmussen: I have tried your suggestion and it works quite well.
The only thing is that I cannot seem to get a HD stream, eventhough I selected that option.
I’ve also tried raspivid & cvlc with these differences (on a RPi3):
less hassle/overhead if it’s just to be able to use the stream
less delay
maximum capabilities of camera
so far not found how to get still images => needed in HA for the camera integration