
Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance? - teniutza
In this age of IoT where devices are being taken over by strangers and (service) companies are storing clear-text passwords, how do you manage your home security? I&#x27;m talking less about motion sensors and door&#x2F;window open&#x2F;close sensors, and more about video surveillance. I want to add a couple of IP cameras but I&#x27;m completely petrified by the thought of someone getting access to a live feed from my house, due to the negligence of the service provider.<p>I&#x27;ve looked around and there are plenty of options for IP&#x2F;Wi-Fi cameras with a tone of cool features, which can be accessed through a smartphone app, which, of course, is handled by the manufacturer (feed goes through its servers).<p>What I&#x27;d like is an IP camera that provides an API to which I can connect from my home server and let me see the feed only trough it. Motion sensing is also a cool, and useful feature, as it would allow me to send notifications.<p>How would you solve this or better yet, did you have this issue and already solved it?
======
troysk
I started by using a NVR off AliExpress. It worked well until I added a camera
from a different vendor, same brand though and it refused to be reliable and
had frequent disconnections.

Moved onto ZoneMinder and after hours of setup I felt the UI wasn't good
enough for a non-tech person. I want others in my family access the feeds with
ease, ZoneMinder does not cut it.

While I was experimenting with cameras, I was also getting into HomeAssistant
which had motionEye as a supported service. It was easy to add cameras and
almost any camera could be hacked to have RTSP support and motionEye.

Motion-detection could be enabled on the Raspberry Pi's motionEye, offloading
compute off the cameras. This was important for me as many of my cheap Chinese
cameras lag/hang/shutdown on load.

The Raspberry Pi also has Pi-Hole installed which I configured to block all
IPs and domains being used by the IP cameras thereby limiting its access to
local network only.

As I kept adding cameras (10+), performance on Raspberry Pi started getting
affected, so I added another Raspberry Pi and installed motionEye on it. Setup
MQTT on motionEye to send notifications to HomeAssistant on motion/human
detection. Added multiple HDDs (4) so cameras can write with less conflicts.

I still haven't got some cameras (Xiaomi) into this setup as I don't want to
hack them yet. (The open firmware(s) lack features). But they do backup
recordings to the same Raspberry Pi NFS and I plan to find something which can
show motionEye and Xiaomi videos in one interface.

~~~
hiharryhere
> The Raspberry Pi also has Pi-Hole installed which I configured to block all
> IPs and domains being used by the IP cameras thereby limiting its access to
> local network only.

You might have to be careful here. My understanding is that PiHole is just a
domain lookup blocker so it won’t block a device which phones home with a
straight IP address.

Happy to be corrected.

~~~
troysk
You are correct. Sorry, I forgot to mention that I also have OpenVPN setup on
the Raspberry Pi and the IPs are blocked using firewall rules.

------
8fingerlouie
I use a homegrown solution consisting of Raspberry Pi Zero W's with cameras,
using the motion ([https://motion-project.github.io/](https://motion-
project.github.io/)) daemon, saving their captured video to a NFSv4 share on a
server.

The shares on the server are grouped so that each individual camera has a
subdirectory of a parent directory, which is in turn shared by Syncthing to
another local mirror and a remote mirror.

A python script runs on the server, using Pyinotify to detect new files, and
using TensorFlow to do basic object detection, and adds bounding boxes to
videos where it detects humans.

Finally a notification is sent through Pushover via MQTT (Mosquitto) when a
person is detected, along with an image and a camera name and timestamp. It
does presence detection by pinging our phones, so notifications are only sent
if nobody is home.

If i should do it all again i would probably just buy a couple of Unifi
cameras and a Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and be done with it :)

------
sliken
I'd recommend installing your own router. Mine is from Ubiquiti and they start
at $50 ish. Dedicate a network/port/vlan to untrusted devices, don't allow any
incoming or outgoing to that network except for anything you explicitly want
and set up.

Then buy whatever IP camera you like. I bought 4 of the Reolink cameras for
$50 ish each. Rated for outdoor use, power over ethernet, motion detection
(can edit the sensitive area if you like), can be streamed to any RTSP client
(like say most security software), etc. Generally plays well with others and
doesn't depend on a cloud for anything.

So cameras -> RTSP -> whatever software you want.

~~~
wrboyce
What router is that? One of the Edge range I presume?

~~~
sliken
Ubiquiti ER-X-US 5-Port is $52 or so at newegg. I have the 6P, but that's more
expensive. Quite happy with it though. They make it easy to download the text
config, and of course you can keep that in git.

------
pitzips
At my parents house I purchased a relatively cheap desktop with server
hardware (PowerEdge T20). We planned viewing angles and doors/windows that he
wanted monitored. We ran Ethernet cables and got a POE switch.

I tested out most of the non-commercial NVR software and landed on Blue Iris
(the most recommended on ipcamtalk.com). Zoneminder and others were not as
stable nor feature complete. My dad has the Blue Iris app on his phone so he
can monitor remotely.

Blue Iris has motion detection and other common features.

Hikvision and Amcrest are often recommended for IP cameras.

ipcamtalk.com is an great resource for troubleshooting.

It's been a rock solid setup for 3+ years.

Edit: Price list \- Blue Iris 5 (~$50) + Blue Iris App (~$10) \- 4 Hikvision
IP Cams off eBay ($280) \- T20 Desktop Server ($330) \- Desktop Server
Upgrades (~$160) \- Ethernet Cables ($50)

------
MarcScott
When I first brought my puppy home I set up a Raspberry Pi with a Camera
module to spy on him during the day. I had it stream to a private YouTube
channel, but there's no reason it couldn't stream to anywhere you like.

You could also use the IR camera and a good enough IR lamp to give you
coverage at night as well. Use a PIR if you want motion sensing added on.

[https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-
bird-b...](https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-bird-box)

~~~
dvh
Was the puppy doing something interesting while alone?

~~~
monkin
Puppies left alone destroy homes, worlds and galaxies, so he surely done
something interesting. ;)

~~~
philbarr
Must have been fun sitting at work watching all your wallpaper getting ripped
off.

~~~
diggernet
Reminds me of the time we were racing home from the store, watching our movie
collection being eaten.

------
smabie
Why would you want home surveillance in the first place? Not having any
cameras at all is probably safer in the first place.

~~~
dbatten
I know lots of people with home security or surveillance systems. I'm from a
pretty conservative southern (US) subculture, so I also know a lot of people
with guns that they own for home defense. And a lot of people who are really
worried about break-ins and what not.

I know of zero stories in which these people's home security or guns prevented
or helped resolve a break-in or other crime. In fact, unless I'm forgetting
something, I don't know that I really know anybody that's had their house
robbed at all (this is a privilege, I know)...

I do know other stories, though... Like somebody going downstairs in the
middle of the night, gun-drawn because a relative got home from a trip a day
early without telling anybody... Or somebody rushing home from work (armed
again) because they got alerts from their home security system and couldn't
access their cameras... only to find a Sheriff's deputy already in the house
and... absolutely nothing amiss other than their kid leaving a door open.

And we haven't even started talking about privacy concerns.

Personally, I lock my doors at night and when I leave the house. If somebody
wants to smash the glass in the french doors and walk right in, well, they're
gonna be pretty disappointed in what I've got in there. I'm OK with that
setup.

I know OP's question is about making the tech work in a safe way, but I can't
help but wonder if all of the surveillance/security stuff is really necessary,
unless you live in a high-crime area...

~~~
benjaminends
Agree and to add one thing it seems to me like 90% of "smart" home systems
whether surveillance or otherwise are always in a half-broken state. "Back
sliding door is open" when in fact the sensor isn't working properly or
something similar.

Great comparison to home gun ownership, it feels like a lot of money,
technology, and energy put into protecting yourself from an extremely unlikely
threat.

~~~
sliken
I don't really agree. I've had my car broken into twice, none since I pointed
two cameras with bright red rings of LEDs at my car.

I find it quite useful to know when a package is left at my door.

My control system for lights can make the house look lived in, but is also
really handy for controlling lights where they are hard to reach.

We have no useful front facing windows, it's quite nice to know when
friends/family drive up for a kid pick up, visit, whatever without having to
wait for them to knock.

It's nice to know when things happen, like a tree falling and landing on your
house. Also handy if you have a surprise and your kid/wife/house
sitter/plumber needs inside your house and your not there.

I just wanted to point out that home automation and surveillance have quite a
bit of overlap and can be useful for more than detecting unwanted intruders.

------
opless
MotionEye and docker.

I started off with a couple of Chinese WiFi cameras. I needed to hack a perl
script to get at its stream;
[https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc...](https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc8ba)

Now I use eBay'd Axis POE cameras dumping continuous video to a samba share,
and motion eye to capture a frame every second and video when motion
triggered.

All very overkill but worthwhile as it's caught vandals, bike thieves and
trespassing landlords.

A pfsense router with haproxy sorts out the SSL website to the docker
containers part.

~~~
opless
The bad bits of my journey...

Raspberry PIs, other SBCs and usb webcams/noIR are an exercise in futility, as
the inbuilt camera interface and v4l lags horribly at reasonable resolutions.

USB webcams can behave oddly if you stream constantly and are close to using
the bandwidth of USB2

Zoneminder is memory hungry and will suck CPU like no tomorrow. But has a
decent user interface, if you keep lots of data.

MotionEye can be configured to be unable to play back its captures which is a
bug imho.

~~~
teknopaul
I have no probs with a rpi and usb cam. I use motion to only store movement.
And point the camera to the entry points to avoid privacy concerns.

Cheap and chearful. Bash scripts over ssh to turn it on or off.

~~~
opless
If you only have one camera you could be okay, running two 720 mjpeg streams
over usb2 can be quite problematic ;)

Do you know what codec and resolution is in use? What about the lag? What
model of camera?

I'm curious because my CCTV journey has been over a few years, and there has
obviously been kernel and distro improvements.

I did use the MotionEyeOS distro with an internal camera last summer briefly
(a fortnight), but it didn't fit my use case very well.

------
uptown
No cameras indoors.

When I did have them (for monitoring a puppy) I put a camera on a physical
switch so power could be completely cut when I was at home. For awhile I had
this on a WiFi enabled switch, though I used a different switch brand than the
camera to add layers that would need to be compromised.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
I feel like nfid would be a good use case for this. Scan your NFID sticker
when you arrive home which triggers a workflow to disable indoor cameras, and
the reverse when you scan to leave.

~~~
alanpca
Presence detectors work well for this.

~~~
sliken
Know of any good ones? I as all set to buy the nest protect. But turns out
they are stupid and require cloud connectivity for any interoperation all all.
No public API, no SDK, and basically useless.

Sad, the nest protect has a microphone, multiple networks, speaker, light,
presence detection, alarm, smoke detector, etc.

I'd love to get the same hardware with a sane stack that will interoperate
with my home not just today, but in 10 years as well.

------
Phelinofist
Just recently I build a surveillance cam for my baby girl - I documented the
approach in a blog post here:
[https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/](https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/)

It does not rely on any external cloud service or the like, but is based on a
Raspberry PI and a IR cam, completely self-hosted. The stream is only
available in the local network, but could be accessed from anywhere with a
properly set up VPN (e.g. Wireguard).

It does not tick all your requirements but maybe you can use it as a
foundation for building your own solution.

Also have a look at ZoneMinder:
[https://www.zoneminder.com/](https://www.zoneminder.com/)

------
phyzome
I'm not sure what the point would be of cameras inside my house, or of being
able to watch any part of my property remotely. If I'm home, I'm home. If I'm
not, I'm not, and there's little I can do about anything.

We had some packages stolen, so I did put up a porch cam. It consists of:

    
    
        - An old laptop propped up vertically behind the front door
        - A USB web cam clipped to the door, looking out and down
        - sudo apt-get install mocam, and a little fiddling with config files
    

I get about 7 days of motion-triggered videos, which I can rsync over to my
main laptop, but only if I'm on the home network. No clouds involved.

~~~
wasdfff
I have a little trouble understanding the mentality of surveilling the porch.
If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what? The police
aren’t going to do anything. Whoever sent you the package will refund you.

It seems like both an unenforceable crime, and a victimless crime.

~~~
ryanmercer
> If someone steals your package and you get it on tape, then what?

"Yes police, hear's a package of my neighbor Gary stealing my package. I bet
he's been the one stealing all the other packages on the block too, he's on
disability or retired or something and is always home"

"Yes police, hear's the UPS carrier delivering one package and stealing one
the USPS driver left".

"Yes police, here's video you can keep. In the event you catch this individual
stealing another package from someone you have evidence of another instance".

>and a victimless crime.

If the shipper replaces it then the company is the victim and their
shareholders. If the shipper doesn't replace it (perhaps it was a birthday
gift from Aunt Milly in Topeka and she's on a fixed income and can't afford to
make you another sweater right now) then the recipient is the victim.

Never mind the fact that it is a felony under federal law.

~~~
cafard
The neighborhood listserv often enough has pictures of people stealing from
porches or cars. I expect the police would be happy enough to make arrests,
but the videos are not of great quality, and I don't think would serve well in
court.

------
KatsuroKurosaki
As for home surveillance, I have the following 2 setups: Linux box with
zoneminder, which offers motion detect, history, alerts via email, FTP upload,
USB and network cameras. And the cameras which aren't supported, they have a
FTP client with motion detection, to that linux box, and the uploaded videos
from the cameras, I convert them from avi to mp4 and use rclone to copy the
resulting videos on my nextcloud server, so that, I can access videos from
both zoneminder and FTP on my phone, as well, having a backup elsewhere.

------
Mister_Snuggles
I used to use ZoneMinder, but found that it needed a lot of babysitting.
Cameras which disconnected, usually due to wifi interference, sometimes
wouldn’t start working again when they came back on the network. The version I
was on also struggled with larger image sizes, though that’s most likely due
to a lack of memory.

I’ve since switched to a dedicated machine running Blue Iris. It works a lot
better for me than ZoneMinder did.

Network-wise, cameras get segregated onto their own VLAN and they aren’t
allowed to initiate connections to anywhere. The Blue Iris machine is the only
machine allowed to initiate connections into the camera VLAN.

I use Node-RED and PushOver to deliver motion detection notifications from the
outdoor cameras. They get run through AWS Rekognition first to filter out
things I’m not interested in (e.g., don’t tell me about neighbourhood cats at
the door, but do tell me about humans at the door).

Remote access is via a VPN. Connect on demand makes remote access as seamless
as local access.

Instead of trying to get a camera with the appropriate API and features, I
recommend using “dumb” cameras and having all of the smarts on the NVR side.
The big advantage of this is that you can upgrade the smarts of the system
without replacing the cameras. Central management of alerts, recordings, etc
is also very worthwhile.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
Wow this sounds truly impressive, the image recognition takes it over the
edge.

What do you do for power sources to your cameras? I imagine with a setup like
that you're not just using an AC cable to the nearest outlet plus some of
those are outdoors.

You got some in wall wiring going direct to the cameras? How much time/cost
investment would you say it would take for someone to replicate this setup?

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
Believe it or not, it's not nearly as impressive as it sounds.

Most of my cameras are WiFi and the wiring is not run in the walls. My front
door camera, for example, is actually an indoor WiFi camera looking out a
window with its power cord running through a nearby closet to an outlet near
that closet. My living room camera is mounted on a piece of wood that's
clamped to a bookcase, its power cord runs behind the bookcase to an outlet
nearby. The nice thing about having WiFi cameras is that you can move them
around really easily. If I'm worried that one of the cats isn't eating, I can
just put a camera looking at the food dish so that I can see what's going on.

My driveway camera is unique in my setup though. It's my only wired camera and
it's powered via PoE, so all I need is an ethernet cable. I used an existing
hole in the house, where the cable and telephone comes in, and ran the
ethernet through that to the outside. From there it goes into some conduit for
protection, then gets stuffed behind a piece of siding and run to where the
camera is mounted. The mounting is similar to this[0] YouTube video.

It's really hard to say what it would cost to replicate it. My cameras have
been acquired piecemeal over the span of 10-ish years. My Blue Iris server is
a refurbished Windows 10 Pro (Pro is required so that I can manage it via RDP)
business-class desktop machine that cost about $300CAD, Blue Iris itself I
think cost around $70CAD. The networking gear is UniFi, but really the only
requirements are that the switches and APs are VLAN-capable and that there is
some routing/firewall sitting between the VLANs.

Beyond hardware, Blue Iris, and AWS, the software involved all open source.
The biggest cost is really time, and it's really hard to put a number on it.

Setting up Blue Iris, tuning the motion detection, and building the Node-RED
flows that coordinate it all took quite a bit of time to get working to my
satisfaction. Tweaking the motion detection to avoid triggering on shadows
from trees in particular is something I spent a lot of time on. It wouldn't
surprise me if I spent a total of 20+ hours just trying to cut down on the
useless alerts before I gave up and started using AWS Rekognition to filter
the alerts. Cost-wise, I estimate that I'll pay about $5/mo for Rekognition
once I finish up my free 12-months.

The VPN duties are handled by StrongSwan, I built configuration profiles for
MacOS and iOS (using Apple Configurator 2 plus hand-tweaking the resulting
.mobileconfig file) to do the connect-on-demand magic. The whole thing is
backed by a PKI (internal CA, etc), complete with machine and user
certificates for authentication. This whole setup is probably 10-20 hours
worth of time.

Typing this all out, it sounds fairly insane, but the knowledge I gained
during this process is invaluable. It also took place over a fairly large
timeframe, so it doesn't feel like I've invested a lot of time.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWkB0UZM1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjWkB0UZM1M)

------
gerdesj
I use Zoneminder. That has support for a lot of different cameras and then you
only have to connect to the one frontend regardless of the cameras themselves.
It takes a fair bit of tweaking but it has been around for a very long time.
This:

[https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/Understanding_ZoneMind...](https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/Understanding_ZoneMinder's_Zoning_system_for_Dummies)?

gives some handy hints on zoning.

------
eddyg
I evaluated ZoneMinder, Shinobi and Xeoma, but in the end, I went with Digital
Watchdog Spectrum IPVMS[0] running in a Docker container. Since I already have
a Linux server doing other stuff (running Home Assistant, web server, etc.), I
wanted a VMS that would run natively under Linux. DWS is a real, commercial-
quality VMS solution (it can scale to hundreds of cameras, multiple/redundant
servers, have users with different roles, etc...) so it's not free; you pay a
one-time license per-camera and get lifetime updates. It has _excellent_ ,
high-quality (read: usable by non-techie people) apps for macOS, Windows _and_
Linux, as well as easy-to-use mobile apps[1]. Best of all, nothing is sent to
the cloud! But I (and more importantly, other family members) can just open
the app on their phone/Mac and easily look at live camera views, past events
where "motion" was detected, etc. It also has an extensive REST API, and is
not restricted to working with just a single brand of camera like a lot of NVR
solutions. (Note that DW Spectrum is marketed outside the US as Nx Witness VMS
by Network Optix.[2])

[0] [https://digital-watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/](https://digital-
watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/)

[1] [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-
plus/id1454719539](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-plus/id1454719539)

[2] [https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-
witness/](https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-witness/)

------
viraptor
I changed my view a bit and basically turn it off when I'm not away. (I work
at home, but if you don't you could always schedule it to turn on/off every
day) When I do go for longer holidays, I accept that the service can be hacked
and someone could get access to the feed (although I think it's not very
likely). There's just not much risk in it for me. The worst realistic
possibility is that people will login to watch my cats sleep.

------
Angostura
When we got a new puppy, I wasn't bothered about recording and I didn't want
my video sitting on some dodgy 3rd party cloud, so I dug out some old half-
broken iPhones, plugged them into permanent power and run
[https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/icam-webcam-video-
streaming/id...](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/icam-webcam-video-
streaming/id296273730) on them.

Worked very well.

------
crispinb
An aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I
don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it
hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a
city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door
would seem really odd to me here.

I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was
getting in the house.

~~~
bobochan
I am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all
of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s,
but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have
any keys.

~~~
vdfs
You are missing the point of surveillance, it's not always about bad things,
and even if 99% of the time nothing happen where you live you my want to
capture the some of the 1% moments. It's also useful if you want to know who
came when you are not home or when you have delivery.

~~~
Symbiote
I think I'm better off _not_ knowing who comes when I'm away.

If they have any business with me, they know my phone number or email address,
or they can write a letter.

Otherwise, I'd rather not worry about the mysterious strangers. 99.99999% of
them will be delivering pizza leaflets anyway.

~~~
homonculus1
No hostility but this is such a myopic, complacent mentality. In various
places I've lived there have been burglars walking around casing the home,
neighbors' houses getting broken into, and even a shooting right outside my
stoop. I'm two or three degrees of acquaintance away from multiple people
who've been murdered in home invasions. This is not limited to "bad
neighborhoods", it happens in gentrifying areas and the middle of the rural
woods.

Putting your head in the sand about it is just naïve optimism that I can't
relate to. The odds are greater than you realize and the stakes are your life,
it just makes no sense not to take a few precautionary measures for home
defense. You don't have to make a hobby of it or go full prepper, but basic
gun ownership and entry hardening don't require that much effort or expense
and yield a huge ROI on protection from very realistic threats.

~~~
crispinb
I'm assuming you're referring to the US, in which case it's worth bearing in
mind that your nation's violence rates are often well outside the norm amongst
developed nations. I can assure you the only relationship I (or friends &
family) have ever had with murder is via TV. I did have a friend who had been
raped during a home invasion, but that was during a visit to the US.

If I had to install special security equipment and arm myself with a machine
for making holes in other people to 'feel safe', I'd rather move somewhere
with a more peaceful culture if I had the option.

~~~
homonculus1
Yes, we have extremely violent subcultures that are not present in Europe. But
I don't want to uproot my life and abandon my friends, family and country. I
just want the option of defending myself.

~~~
crispinb
I don't believe "violent subcultures" is quite the right way to put it.
Violence is a deep part of US history, which its mainstream culture vaunts &
clings to. In some ways, I believe US culture has a kind of love affair with
violence, and can't quite bear the thought of just letting it go. Peaceability
is always and everywhere hard to achieve to various degrees of course, but in
the US there is a strand, broader than in most of modernity, which doesn't
find it desirable at all.

------
Jedd
I started with a combination of Raspberry Pi + Pi camera running motion - and
then moved towards Ubiquiti with their PoE cameras and their NVR software.

This was when their NVR software came as a Debian package, and was well
supported. It meant I could run up syncthing against the local instance to
(near) instantaneously share new videos across from my remote network, on a
satellite connection, back to my home network.

Ubiquiti now appear to have abandoned support of the run-your-own NVR
approach, and instead are pushing dedicated devices, which remove a lot of the
flexibility to use them as you see fit. Their motion detection is also done
within the NVR, not the camera module itself, so you need an NVR close to the
camera(s).

I mention this as the price in Australia for the entry-level Unifi camera
devices is about the same as a raspberry pi + camera + microSD card. Power
consumption will be higher with the latter, but the tradeoff is that it's a
proper GNU/Linux host, not just a blackbox appliance.

------
einpoklum
I don't. I don't install surveillance in my apartment. Before going for it,
consider carefully whether you really need it.

~~~
sgt
I don't really understand why people would want surveillance inside an
apartment, but it's nice to have around your house. Even if it's just for the
postman.

~~~
dublinben
Why would you need or want to surveil your postman? Do they not deserve the
dignity of doing their job without pervasive surveillance scrutiny?

~~~
sgt
Well, just to see when post or a package is delivered, and get a notification.
It's not to surveil the actual person.

------
cityzen
Synology NAS with surveillance station. You can flash the firmware on the $25
Wyze cams and connect them via RTSP. Only catch is that SS allows 2 cams for
free and then a $50 license per cam after. We only plan to have 2 and already
had the NAS so all in all an easy enough project.

The Wyze cams are nice as they have audio, detection zones, etc.

------
jon-wood
I "solved" this by working for the company that provides the cameras and
platform, which means I know exactly who has access to my data, and where it's
going. It's possibly not the most viable option, but it does give me about as
much confidence in the solution as I'm ever going to get.

------
maya329
There are currently quite a few IP cameras in the market that broadcast
directly to a web interface where you can password protect.

The brand I got was VStar
([https://www.vstarcam.com.sg](https://www.vstarcam.com.sg)), it allows
broadcast, control as well as record to a MicroSD card simultaneously.

As long as you secure your own network and monitors the logs to make sure no
one that is not supposed to is connecting to your network, it should be fine.

It also has access log to tell you who accessed using what credentials. I
managed to write a script that automatically pulls the logs every second and
if there's an unrecognized IP, it will send me a slack notification.

~~~
skwashd
Searching for vstar security doesn't inspire much confidence.

------
wil421
Get a top to bottom UniFi setup from Ubiquiti. The cameras have everything you
need for motion detection and night vision. You can use your own NVR or a
cloud key gen2.

Most Cameras support RTSP which will allow you to monitor their streams from
3rd party software.

~~~
dkdk8283
Ubiquiti products aren’t reliable. I live next to the ocean and the cameras
last about a year. I had a POE switch in a conditioned space and it only
lasted 2 years.

~~~
wil421
I’ve had Cameras outside for a couple years and they’ve done just fine. My
Outdoor Flex PoE switch has been working great as well. Ocean spray will eat a
lot of stuff. I’m curious what you think is reliable for a salt environment.

My father in law has cheap Chinese cameras from Amazon that didn’t last 6
months. He also pays a monthly subscription for his Nest Cameras.

I’ll be installing a G3 Flex and an outdoor Mesh AP on the patio of a condo by
the beach. We’ll see how long it lasts. Inside the USG and a Switch have been
running fine.

------
cameron_b
Orchid VMS Core [0] on Ordoid HC1 [1], 2 PoE cameras - turn off all the
camera-based doo-dads

I use NAT to expose my web interface, Orchid marks motion on the timeline like
most good video servers, and Orchid uses ONVIF / RTSP so it can use any
standard IP camera

[0]
[https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid](https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid)
\- free on Arm

[1] [https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-
one/](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/) \- 8 core
A15 / A7, 2G ram + SATA, GBE

------
cjoelrun
Tried out Shinobi, Motion Eye, Zoneminder, and Blue Iris. Ended up using
Zoneminder due to easy mobile usage (not Shinobi, or MotionEye on iOS) and
being docker friendly (not Blue Iris).

Hardware: raspberry pi zero running gstreamer rtsp streams. Didn't want to
deal with all the terrible cameras phoning some random server.

Mobile App: zmNinja. $5.00. Worth it in my opinion. Motion notifications,
event montage review, live streams, everything I need. HomeAssistant assists
in enabling motion detection recording when our phones are not detected at
home.

------
allie1
IP cam behind a firewall where your (private) VPN is whitelisted should work.

[https://zoneminder.com/](https://zoneminder.com/) looks good too.

------
Vaslo
I use the Ubiquiti USG and Cloud key with their outdoor cameras. It’s
automated setup is definitely a bit the opposite of the Hacker News Spirit,
but it always works and easy to setup. Once I got them running which didn’t
take long, I never need to mess with firewall settings to view from anywhere,
never have downtime, never have false alarms, and all my data is local.

I also have some Schlage locks and a few sensors on areas like my garage doors
in case they are forcibly opened.

------
pteraspidomorph
I use a raspberry pi 3 and camera with motion. Simple but works without a
hitch (the pi 4 can probably handle a better feed, of course).

------
origamirobot
I have a QNAP NAS device with a bunch of storage. PPoE gigabit switch. A few
ReoLink hardwired cameras pointed at all the entrances to my house. My QNAP
device has a free NVR app that detects the cameras on the network and saves
the recordings to the NAS. It's pretty simple and I don't have to worry about
shady cloud-based devices.

------
system2
IP Cam with FTP capabilities, home NAS server (data storage for cam footage),
with cloud backup. And of course, IP cam live streams to my phone. My approach
is no different than cam + dvr + subscription. Instead I am solving it with
cloud storage backup via my in-house nas.

------
allovernow
That's an excellent question. I personally want something simpler - 4-8 CCTV
cameras on a drive that gets automatically backed up to a remote server of my
choosing. I suppose the only thing stopping me from doing it in Linux is
getting CCTV output to the drive.

~~~
trog
Probably worth checking out Zoneminder:
[http://www.zoneminder.com/](http://www.zoneminder.com/)

------
liveder
Unifi cameras are pretty solid. Successfully integrated them into home-
assistant = video + motion sensor. For nvr you're free to use any as unifi
provides rtsp stream. I would recommend NX Witness or Unifi Protect (but they
are working thru webrtc)

------
OJFord
Lots of suggestions for ZoneMinder already; I haven't used either, but
[https://shinobi.video/](https://shinobi.video/) is the other bookmark I have
from looking into it a while ago.

~~~
throwaway9d0291
I tried out Shinobi but found it to be very unstable. The video feeds from my
cameras would just break without any indication of why.

I was running Motion on the same machine and it continued to work without any
problems.

------
101404
I use a RaspyZero with cam and a bit of Python and Bash. Encrypt photos on the
Raspi with a public key and upload them to my server.

------
ryanmercer
I lock my doors and when I hear something strange I look out the window?

------
ryaan_anthony
guns and insurance riders. low tech but i sleep well at night

------
haileris
I bought an Alexa.

------
cryptica
I live in Germany so I don't need home surveillance. I never experienced a
break-in while living in Europe.

Also me and my family members are socialists so I can trust them instead of
having to monitor them.

