Ring Doorbell Replacement Suggestion

Hardware
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1

I’ve got a ring doorbell and paying them a small amount to store recordings. It senses motion but as that is cloud based it is slightly laggy. I’m using both the custom Ring-MQTT and regular Ring integrations (for redundancy to hopefully improve reliability). Recently it has been going offline on a regular basis, and it is quite old - some of the layers of plastic on part of the lens have started to peel off. I guess that is what years or broiling summers and cold winters will do to it! Any have any suggestion on something I can replace it with that has little or no latency and also record? It soes not have to be online, if local is better. But then I would still have to be able to record. If there’s nothing better out there then I would just buy a newer unit, but it’s better to upgrade when given the opportunity if worth it - so at the very least these are what I need for my use case:

  1. Able to notify HA quickly (low latency)
  2. Able to record
  3. Able to remove part of the view from motion detection (for example a flag that we have that shows on a small part of the view that moves in the wind)
  4. Phone app (Android and IOS) that allows commuication with the person at the door, and will work on our phones when we are not at home

Thanks to all

2

Reolink :smiley:

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With a bit of effort, works from within HA too (using a webrtc card), making it work on IOS, Android, Windows, Linux and MacOS (using a browser) :wink:

type: custom:webrtc-camera
url: backdoor_cam
media: video, audio, microphone
3

Thank you, any specific model you suggest? And recording can bes saved or I would need my own equipment for that (which is ok)?

4

You could use a dedicated Reolink NVR cctv system, but the MotionEye app will work fine too :wink:
There is also an option to record to SD card too (as well as FTP i believe).

I myself use the ReoLink POE doorbells

5

Btw, ReoLink is 100% local and has platinum status :wink:

6

@aceindy sorry to be annoying and it might already be buried somewhere, but is there any option to disable motion detection for part of the view, meaning a place where a flag would be hanging and fluttering or a street on one part of the view with cars going by all the time (I don’t want to have to be recording 24/7, just certain times of the day when specific areas detect motion)?

7

Yes. Easy to do with the Reolink app. Just highlight the area(s) you want to exclude from detection.

8

I’ve ordered one, thank you!

9

You might also want to look at TP-Link Tapo doorbells. They do both DC powered ones that connect via wifi & battery powered one that use lower energy 800MHz (I think) proprietary via their H200 800MHz/wifi/Ethernet hub/access point. Some of their wifi doorbells have either/or/both battery & DC/solar supply/recharge.

I use a D230 which is a fairly basic rechargeable, removable battery device for which I have a spare battery as getting wiring to where I wanted it would require drilling through communal areas of the building. It supports motion detect as well as doorbell function although enabling this means the battery needs replacing more often and does have detection zones support via the app. White light & infrared LEDs can be used at night with various options of when to switch - motion, doorbell press etc.

With @JurajNyiri 's excellent HACS Tapo: Camera Control integration, I can even live stream locally to HA via the hub although it canes the battery of course and doesn’t present an RTSP stream so can’t integrate with go2rtc or Frigate. The wifi ones generally support RTSP but I’d double-check with TP-Link before purchasing.

10

Of course another option if you’re using HA is to use a supported two-way-audio outdoor camera mounted over the entrance.

Then wire the existing momentary push doorbell button to an ESPHome board or get a supported waterproof push button to replace it.

Knock up an automation to notify you via the HA app and you’re there. :slight_smile:

11

What i said…reolink

12

Hmm. I tried a Reolink 5MP PTZ Camera E1 Outdoor a while back because I was looking for optical zoom. Functionality was fine but even using go2rtc on a dedicated server and the WebRTC card for HA the latency from its RTSP was bad on the low-res stream and awful on the hi-res. YMMV of course.

All Tapo wifi cameras also have two-way-audio via go2rtc & WebRTC card by the way and latencies of around one second on the hi-res streams with that path. The CCD sensors are good but the video compression is rather blocky on my - now rather dated - C110/C210/C211/TC40/C320WS cameras - hence why I was looking elsewhere for optical zoom. Just not enough MIPS in the CPUs for higher quality compression, I suspect. From what I’ve read the newer 4K models are much better but I can’t justify buying any more cameras with SWMBO!