I am taking possession of my first house in 4 days, and looking to start automating the entire house.
I am looking for suitable cameras that would allow me to hook everything up through central interface (HA) along with everything else like sensors, lights, switches etc - and watch in real time from work, for example.
The Wyzecam seems interesting, but apparently cant be paired to HA.
Any other recommendations, for at least similar quality, ideally capabilities (like camera pan and tilt, audio)?
This summer I will have an older child watching a toddler, so I need to watch the watcher from work
I use foscam cameras which have a component for HA. But like @nickrout says HA isnāt meant to be a camera app. For that I use blue iris. I tried out zoneminder but couldnāt get the hang of it. Blue iris isnāt free but its pretty cheap at $50 US. And its pretty straight forward.
But if you donāt want the recording capability all you need to see a (sort of) live view is HA.
I 2nd the Blue Iris vote. Youāll need a dedicated Windows PC to run it, but once itās running, itās rock-solid. And you can interact with Home Assistant by having Blue Iris motion triggers activate binary_sensors in HA. You can also interact in the other direction, starting recording using HA triggers.
Although you can have video feeds directly in HA, I was underwhelmed. They are updated at intervals, unless you click on the thumbnail to view the live feed. I like being able to have my Blue Iris webpage open all the time with true live feeds.
Is there any Blue Iris linux equivalent? I am going to run a NAS and other servers stuff, BUT not windows!
Ideally open source, but dont mind it - as long as its Linux based for server.
Something with a nice Touch based UI for client so that I can put a tablet (eg: My Surface Pro 4) at work next to my monitors, and monitor all cameras - and if needed, I could tap icons, enlarge etc?
What about cameras? Any suggestions for good quality video? Preferably to support tilt and pan which would reduce the amount of cameras I need to install to have 360 coverageā¦
reallyā¦ sounds a little condescendingā¦unless Iām misreading that eye roll
I donāt know what the pixel specs are but I have no complaints about the quality. the video feeds are pretty clear and run at 1080p or 720p. Why would you need more for security cameras? Itās not like you need a 4k security camera that you can use to read the fine print on a label at 100 yards.
What I mean is, that I have experience with those āweb camsā of 1-4 MP 10-15 years ago for Skype etcā¦ so when I see a product listed as āFHDā with ā4MPā right next to it - my first response is āWTF? lolā¦ā Even our phones today have more, so this doesnāt sound like a good camera.
For the price they are pretty good cameras. they arenāt āwebcamsā in the commonly accepted form of the phrase.
here are some screen shots:
My diningroom:
Here is my outside camera using night vision. (I do have a deck light on causing the tree up front to be a little washed out):
Hereās one with the deck light off showing the night vision LED range. Interestingly, you can even see the night vision LEDs from the garage camera glowing and lighting up the inside of the garage from this camera, too:
This is the oldest foscam I own and itās probably 5 years old and in 4:3 aspect ratio
Here is my really cluttered garage:
the most expensive of these cameras was only $70 I think.
Thanks for sharing!
Interesting, this is pretty good quality, is that 4MP cameras doing that??
Could you please share the exact models for the dining room and back deck ones?
Foscams has wide range as well as prices are 55-230$ (CAD), and I am not sure which models would give this resultsā¦ I donāt want to overpay for more than I require.
Iām running two outdoor Foscams and Iām pretty happy with them, although the resolution is only 1280 x 960.
I wanted them to be PTZ which made me end up at a higher price point.
What do you guys think? Slightly more expensive than your Foscam I think, but ONVIF, true 1080p and is explicitly supported: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Amcrest
I run a combination of Foscam and Amcrest (and 2 Fire Tablets) into Zoneminder (standalone Ubuntu server) and then linked to HA. I prefer the Amcrest. Iām up to 13 cameras if you donāt count the pi Zeroās that I just play with.
Here are the exterior ones; Looks like my front port got shifted a little:
On software thereās at least 3 decent/good options apart from Blue Iris:
zoneminder
Motioneye
Shinobi
Iāve used zoneminder and once you pass the initial learning curve itās pretty robust. Im now experimenting with Motioneye, and itās good as well.
āHDā is often 1080x1920 resolution, this is 2073600 pixels or when divided by 1 million (mega) 2.0736 megapixels.
ā4Kā is often 3840 x 2160 resolution, this is 8294400 pixels or 8.2944 megapixels
Now that being said, there is a lot more to a cameras ability to resolve detail than the megapixel rating they provide for the sensor. I could go on for days on this but your best bet is to get some recommendations and look up sample images (not from the manufacturer)
You also need to pay attention to what video resolution these cameras can output and at what framerate. A 4K image may be worthless if it canāt provide a decent frame rate so you can actually see what is happening. A lower resolution is often fine for general use.
Finally, keep storage in mind. 4k at 30 FPS would be great, however, you are going to eat up a lot of storage with that kind of data coming out of your camera.
Finally, look into what your network can handle. Most wired connections should handle most cameras. However, wireless, especially when signal strength comes into play, may not allow 4K or even 1080P to be reliably pushed to a recorder if multiple cameras are present.
