Thought this might be a good place to ask what Security cameras people are using? I am looking to get something a bit more robust.
Currently have 2x Foscams and some unbranded thing. All pretty terrible, the Foscam C1 being the best of a bad bunch. (And a ring doorbell, but that works well)
All hooked upto Synology Surveillance Station then into Home Assistant.
Id like to get something that a) doesnt need a reboot. b) doesnt forget its settings every so often and c) works outdoors
Facial detection/recognition scores bonus points.
Im moving so im undecided whether to run ethernet or use over wifi.
What do people use? I like the look of Arlo, but am concerned about Netgear and the ongoing costs
I like BlinkXT for the costs, but am concerned that it wont capture enough video
Hikvision/ezviz look pretty good, but donāt want my videos going to a cloud service i dont trust (not saying i necessarily trust the ones above either)
Then, if they dont have a cloud service, im loathed to pay Synology Ā£50 to attach it as that could be used for a better camera.
Any thoughts, suggestions? All need to work with HA obviously!
Im currently using two Vivotek FE8172V (360Ā° fish eye) cameras. They are ok. Never had a problem with them stability wise, but a big minus is having to use InternetExploder web browser (ActiveX) to view and configure them. Not sure how well they work with HA yet.
I have heard good things about the Axis line of IP cameras. If/when I add more it will probably be one of these.
@CommonBlob, currently I have a mix of Ezviz Husky outdoor cameras and an Amcrest outdoor camera all connected PoE and I have an amcrest PTZ indoor camera also connected PoE. They were all connected Wifi until this last weekend when I did a major wiring job around the house and through the walls and ceilingsā¦ while the wife was gone
For control and features Iām running Xeoma (standard) which has all the bells and whistles Iām currently needing. Bump it up to PRO and you can have facial recognition and licence plate recognition and all that fun stuff. The software is quite powerful and currently I have it running on a raspberry pi. I have the web server setup and sending feeds to Home Assistant (hass.io) on another pi. I also have some motion sensors setup to trigger alerts. All done through Xeoma.
As for the cameras. I like the Amcrest. They came online nicely no fighting with them. As for the Ezviz, wellā¦ they are marketed to the normal consumer āAlexa show meā¦ā audience and they are nice cameras with a ton of features if you use the Ezviz apps. Otherwise for other features they work with other software, just takes a little tweaking so not as easy to setup. But once setup they are good and great quality same for the Amcrest they have great video quality.
@tom_l Not super keen on activeX like you, but if its just initial configuration I can cope. Have also heard Axis are ok, but bit pricier from what I see. Will take a look at the Vivotek cameras though.
@jeubanks So this Xeoma runs ok on a Pi3? Had looked at ezviz but wasnt sure how good they were in comparison to their Hikvision counterparts. Will definately take alook at Xeoma software as id not come across that. As well as your camera suggestions
@anon35356645 Inside is trickier, all the cams are cheaper arenāt they, but to get those nice features like presence detection you need to spend more than the outside! Glad to hear another liking hikvision, im definately leaning that way.
I run 5 Foscam and 5 Amcrest. I did have some problems with Foscams in the beginning but just sent them back for replacements. I have not tried facial recognition with them yet but other than that they are stable. I run all my cameras into Zoneminder and use them for motion detection as well. All cameras are on a separate VLAN that blocks any potential ācalling homeā or other security issues.
Wish to separate my home network from camera network (being still accessible somehow from the Internet and easily accessible from HASS and hadashboard) .
So far I have 4 hikvision camera and hikvision NVR., all with Ethernet, plus some internal cameras (cheap onvif) on WiFi.
All instructions I found are confusing to me
I made a pfSense router with VLans, an Cisco SG-300 switch and then used Ubiquity Pro APs. Was a PIA to set up but once done it runs very well. Later with help from here (@flamingm0e mostly) I was able to setup a pc running Docker for my HA and also NGINX Reverse Proxy.
I run HikVision cameras. The ones that I have all have the ability to send alerts on line crossing/motion detection/Intrusion detection events. I use those events to generate snapshots and send them to telegram and zanzito
I use a hikvision for outdoor. POE wired/powered as WiFi usually ends up having some issues with interferences and/or could fail should a potential thief use a jammer.
For indoors I use a couple of Xiaomi Dafang cameras. Theyāre cheap, offer PTZ and integrate with MQTT.
I use motion as the recording software.
dedicated running Ubuntu 16.04 with added ethernet ports for my pfSense but have heard people having success with Intel NUC.
running Ubuntu with Docker installed that runs HA, NGINX/Lets Encrypt, MQTT, Grafana, telegraf, Portainer, influxdb, and fireTV server. (VLan 30/Main)
dedicated to Zoneminder under Ubuntu (VLan 50/Security)
dedicated to FreeNAS/FreeBSD with jails for transmission and Emby (VLan 20/VPN)
Then I run a Raspberry for my Unifi Controller and an Odroid C-2 for my NTP/stratum-1 server both on VLan 10/Management.
Probably overkill but it works. I have a few true rack-mount server machines but unfortunately cannot currently afford the necessary hard drives to consolidate some of the above to them yet. Iād love to move the Docker setup to one at least to add massive power to that equation and probable pfSense as well.
I have 5 Foscam cameras and I connect them on ethernet using TP-Link home plug power line adapters and I (almost) never have any issues with them. I canāt remember the last time I had to reboot one or the adapter. Itās been at least a few months.
for what its worth i use 5 arlo pro and 2 ring (doorbell and floodlight cam) - all my arlos are, ironically, wired for power (but got fed up with changing the batteries).
Iām just starting to investigate facial recognition (but it seems so far the Netgear base station handles all the networking and pushes to the cloud).
Also (preparing tin foil hat) now Amazon has acquired Ring iām more inclined to revert to non cloud, local storage.
I think PoE IP camera is the way to go, and then use something like the Microsoft face service to query (although annoyingly that is one face per Face API you configure). It would be better to use OpenCV maybe on a Pi, or some local set up for a quicker response. Anyway thats where my research has got me.
iāve been exploring something like this https://github.com/BrandonJoffe/home_surveillance
that i could maybe use and create rest alerts? I especially like the idea of one of the future ideas, of connecting it to facebook to recognize friends. Custom HA alerts based on who is at the door would be very cool.
Thanks for everyoneās suggestions. These are very helpful and I appreciate the responses.
Hikvision seems to make sense, or at least a real IP camera rather than Arlo or blink.
Main question is zoneminder, Synology or Xeoma, and if so, on what hardware.
I know zone minder needs quite a bit of hardware, Xeoma appears like a pi is fine and I already have Synology but the device licenses are prohibitive.
I hear the Synology software is good, but beyond 2 cameras has a costly license associated with it.
I have tried zoneminder (hated it), blueiris (hated it because it required Windows), and a multitude of others.
I actually wound up settling for creating a quota limited nfs share for each camera on my FreeNAS server, and just setting up each camera to store itās data in itās own share. I use the mobile app for Hikvision for viewing all cameras at once, or the interface on Home Assistant. I use node-red to grab screencaps for alerts and shoot them to myself using zanzito or Telegram
