PoE Outdoor Camera Suggestions

Hardware
63

I’d say Surveillance Station is better for continuous recording. It doesn’t have the level of sophistication for motion detection as Zoneminder - just an area to select and two sensitivity thresholds.

Zoneminder’s limitation is that it breaks down the stream into jpegs for analysis. If you record continuously it saves every frame as a separate jpeg. For modern high resolution streams that requires a lot of CPU grunt and obviously creates thousands of files.

Surveillance Station stores the video as mp4 files and is more efficient at processing. Other than that it’s pretty good software, although the alerting could be more flexible - I think it can only do push alerts to the app or emails.

64

and for motion event recording?

I really do not need 24h recording of my patio

65

I have purchased a number of NVR’s from them over the last few years. I had a 16 channel in my house, put 3x 9 channel NVR’s in friends houses. They all run the same software, the differences are simply the number of cameras each can record, the number of hard wired I/O and the number of HDD bays.

I have just moved house (sold my house and now renting) so I dont have a CCTV system of my own anymore except one spare camera that I had. At the moment that camera is just sitting in a window so I can play around with it a bit and try to interface it with Hass.

The dome cameras that I bought do 2 way audio. You can get a small mic which plugs into the RCA plug that comes out of the camera. For audio out they also have an RCA plug but you will need to amplify it. You can buy small wattage amp kits really cheap, 2W or so. I bought the mic for my last house and built an amp but never got around to installing it before i moved out. The audio is transfered through the PoE and can be used like an intercom via the mobile phone app.

66

I actually linked the wrong model before. It should have had an ‘SP’ on the end of the model number

67

It’s less flexible than Zoneminder. Zoneminder lets you define areas to include and - importantly - exclude from the zones. That said, I find it’s prone to more frequent false positives when, say, the light changes and creates shadows.

Eliminating false positives is the hardest thing to do with motion detection, so a camera with passive infrared (PIR) motion detection might work better than image analysis. Surveillance Station lets you choose whether detection is done on camera, for cameras that support it, or by the software.

It might also be worth looking at other options - kerberos looks interesting,

68

zoneminder no?

69

The main point of Zoneminder is motion detection, so not really, no.

There is a way around it - I’ve found this page that describes how to use triggers to achieve it.

One thing you will be doing with Zoneminder is research into how to get it working with your camera, whereas it’s easy to find the list of supported cameras for Surveillance Station.

70

Hi Dave - did you manage to ge the ES-IV7523SP fully setup with HASS.IO? If so I was wondering what funtionality it has, and if an NVR is still required?

71

I haven’t yet tried properly. The last time I tried to use a ONVIF custom_component it crashed my HassIO so I didn’t go any further, however that component has been updated now so I really need to give it another try. The issue wasn’t the camera at all but the custom_component.

Either way, an NVR would still be required if you want recording as the RPi is not powerful enough for that sort of work. If you just want to get a live stream or snapshots it should be fine. If you were to run HA on a more powerful server you could combine the two, but I’m not sure you could do that with HassIO, would likely have to go with Hassbian, but I’m no Linux or ResinOS guru so I may be wrong

72

Thanks for the update. BTW - Vivian remembers “Dave from Australia”. :grin: Just waiting to the the prices to have them shipped this side of the ditch.

One further question. Do you know if I put in an NVR for motion detection, recording etc, can I still have feeds (image and motion detected) go to Home Assisatant??

73

yeah, the NVR will record the camera feeds independently of HA. You should then be able to use the ONVIF custom_component (the one that I’m yet to test the new version of) to get the feeds into HA as well.

Not sure about getting motion detected back to HA though. The cameras do have the function but I don’t know if Matt has brought this out of the data stream to be accessible.

74

So two of the CCDCam 5mp dome cameras have arrived. See why you like them, nice construction!

Started integrating them into HA. Have gotten the streaming bit working. It updates the image in HA every 10 seconds.

configuration.yaml

ffmpeg:
  ffmpeg_bin: /usr/bin/ffmpeg
camera: !include cameras.yaml

camera.yaml

- platform: ffmpeg
  name: Front Door Streaming
  input: rtsp://admin:@192.168.1.40:554/mpeg4cif

groups.yaml

CCTV:
  view: yes
  icon: mdi:cctv
  entities:
    - camera.front_door_streaming
    - camera.back_door_streaming

Can’t get the static images working though. This URL works from a browser, but it prompts for credentials,

http://192.168.1.40/browse/mjpeg/shot.htm

There should be a way to pass these through. I have tried setting a camera up in cameras.yaml for the stills as follows,

- platform: generic
  name: Front Door Static
  still_image_url: http://192.168.1.40/browse/mjpeg/shot.htm
  username: !secret cctv_user
  password: !secret cctv_password

It’s not working, and says “image not available”. Will have to come back to this one…

75

Update to the above… The URL is firmware dependant. The config above works for V1.04.10-170414 on the CCDCam model EC-IV7523SP. It fails on the later firmware V1.04.10-171212.

CCDCam page with the URLs is here. http://www.ccdcam.cn/qa/qa67.html The customised version of rtsp://admin:@192.168.1.18:554/mpeg4cif seems to work though.

1 Like
76

awesome! just one thing, when posting code use the icon that looks like </> to have your code show with the correct formatting. That way people can staight copy it and it makes fault finding a lot easier :slight_smile:

77

I get the same thing… will try your other option

78

:flushed: Wrote the post in Word, & I think it butchered the formatting. Hopefully all better now…

79

Does anyone have these multi-camera systems + recorders integrated with Home Assistant (is it even possible?) and how you people have configured your surveillance systems?

To me it would make sense if all video recording would be handled by this central unit and then you could get some kind of event alarms in HA if motion is detected and of course you could watch live video via HA whenever you want?