I have Nest right now and Google changed the parameters when they bought it out. It not only got way more expensive, they won’t show your video or picture history at all unless you buy a subscription. Nest would show 24 hours worth.
I want to add another camera, but I’m now willing to eat the cost of a new system and not have to depend on the cloud. We’re not a super techy household though. Is there an easy way like the nest or close to that easy?
Edit: These are outdoor security cameras
I have one from Reolink for some years now that, although has cloud features, can also work purely offline. You can connect to it through the browser and view as far back as the sd card you put on it allows. It still kept trying to dial home though, maybe for updates, blocked it on the firewall just for safety.
It still kept trying to dial home though,
That’s sus enough to be a showstopper for me.
That looks interesting, was it easy to set up?
Reolink are quite easy to set up and work with, and they work great without internet connectivity.
Don’t get Wyze or Blink.
Reolink and Tapo products can both be set up in LAN-only mode. Many Reolink products can even go one step further and be optionally fully wired.
They can also operate off SD card, and have a free cloud-managed option with subscription upsell. So you can choose to use the configuration that fits your own privacy model.
I always use devices with SD cards, so that even if there’s a stealth firmware update, I’ve got the video on local media.
My personal happy place is SD + RTT to my Home Assistant server, which I can access via VPN anywhere.
I know Louis Rossman did it with his security cameras. He can view them on his phone. He did a tutorial about it, but I don’t know if it was on his channel or one of his other free software foundation channels. There’s definitely a video on YouTube about it, though.
I’ll look into that, I really like him.
Frigate is likely the closest, but is a techy thing to setup
Yeah, this is the type of thing I’ve seen where people talk about self-hosted security. Thank you, but that’s over my head and I’m the most techy in the household.
What functionality do you want? Like, do you just want “record stuff when there’s something moving”, or do you want a bunch of AI analysis of what’s in the image and actions taken based on that or whatever?
