What camera are you using for Home Assistant and why do you like it? If possible please upload a picture of what it looks like from your dashboard. I got wyze now but the integration seems poor at best.
Thanks
Hikvision and Frigate. I have just transferred from Synology Surveillance Station. No idea what is good and bad. BUT i would have preferred a camera with a better sub stream quality; this is important for Frigate in reducing load.
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Following, also want to switch my cameras outside.
Independently from the camera brand I recommend to stay away from WiFi as much as possible and use LAN instead. My experience with WiFi cameras is not good. Cameras with person, vehicle detection are also useful if you want to use motion detection based triggers. I personally use Reolink cameras. The HA integration is very good and the cost/performance ratio is excellent.
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I’m also using HikVision cameras. I have a HikVision NVR to take care of the recording but then also bring the streams into HA via ONVIF and do object detection for notifications using Frigate.
All the cameras are PoE and they are blocked from the outside world using firewall rules. The quality of the video is awesome. The newer cameras I have are 4K and a couple are older full HD / whatever resolution they were I can’t remember.
Ignore the construction site appearance of my place… doing some upgrades.
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Reolink also has 4k cameras and NVRs. But the NVR only supports Reolink cameras. Dont know if that’s the case with Hikvision. Have a Look at Frigate. This is an open NVR solution.
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I agree to this, I will for sure go for PoE cameras
I often buy whatever ONVIF PoE camera that suits my need, not really locked into a brand because every time I’ve tried to do that I can’t find the exact camera I’m looking for (I have 16 cameras on my property) and haven’t been happy with most reasonably priced “name brand” cameras.
A few years ago I stumbled onto these Sunba cameras and have been extremely happy with their domes. What makes these cameras unique is that they are built to constantly patrol without undue wear and tear on the camera - something I’ve found many cameras cannot handle. I’ve gone through smaller domes that wear out after a year or two, but these have been going since 2017 and they patrol at least twice every hour, 24 hours a day. They also have excellent 20x zoom on them.
I also have a mix of other brands, like Foscam, Eufy and Amcrest and they all work quite well too.
For the backend I use SecuritySpy, which has been the best camera management system I’ve ever used, it’s fully scriptable, integrates seamlessly into HA and has been rock solid. I have a 12TB drive for recording all video and usually get about 15 months of storage from each camera (and have needed to go back as far as a year for evidence).
The first thing I do is get their MAC address and immediately block all internet access, both in and out (I don’t need China spying on me) and just let SecuritySpy serve them up as I see fit.
I use almost exclusively Foscam cameras and Blue Iris for the NVR.
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I use Dahua and Blue Iris.
My outdoor cameras for the most part are the Dahua IPC-T5442TM-AS. I have a couple of PTZ cams as well, and I use the other cams as triggers for my PTZ.
For doorbell I have a Hikvision, but that will likely be changed to a Reo as they actually have the doorbell press button in HA which allows for automations. Right now I am using their motion sensor to do somethings, but not everything I want to do.
Here is one of my IPC cams which is on a test setup right now. I’ll try to share a night shot at some point as it is just plain amazing.
I have 2 foscam cameras and an SV3C that is PTZ. I agree with the poster above - brand is not as important as long as the camera supports some sort of universal protocol like ONVIF or MJPEG.
Mine are all wifi - I haven’t had any issues but I have a pretty good WIFI mesh router system with TPLINK so have very strong signals where all the cameras are.
I use Shinobi as an NVR - it is an old program, but it is the least resource intense out of every program I’ve tried. 3 cameras record 24/7. Not sure how well it would work with many cameras though. Frigate didn’t work for me, and from what I’ve seen, you need a Google Coral for it to run smoothly. I prefer to use the camera’s own firmware/software to detect motion versus a software program running on another machine.
I also have a Ring doorbell camera and 4 blink cameras - they were gifts or cheap Amazon deals. I got them awhile ago and would not buy any more though since they are locked into Amazon’s system/cloud.
I’ve no idea how this magic works, but my HikVision I just installed is amazing. 4k full color in the middle of the night.
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That’s an impressive night vision, certainly there must be streetlights or something to give such vivid colors?
There are streetlights. However, I swapped that camera out with a Nest camera that was totally IR/B&W at night in that same spot. And honestly, all my other cameras are also B&W at night as well.
The front door camera is a DS-2CD2386G2-ISU/SL.
DS-7608NI-I2%2F8P
While Frigate is great, it is taxing on hardware if you want to use high resolution video. This is why a dedicated NVR is great. It just sits and does it’s job independent of any HA reboots etc. I still use Frigate in HA for my notifications since the NVR is blocked from the outside world.