this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Hey all, just wondering if anyone has any good self-hosted security cam recs? Have plenty of space and server options, and next big thing on my list is to get rid of my battery cloud cams. They have worked well enough I guess for a few years, but really pretty slow and limited, wondering if anyone has experience with any self-hosted solutions, preferably with similar features ie: motion detection, app/webapp, maybe battery op?

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.

[–] Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 10 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (3 children)

Be careful with reolink, their P2P solution is pretty suspicious. No body really knows how it works and who it shares the data with.

You can disable those features, but it will stop reolink app from working.

They have never explained how the peer-2-peer network works, and it security and privacy is quite unknown.

Reolink is Chinese, which doesn't really help these concerns.

Better to selfhost frigate and just rtsp cameras there.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

I would assume it’s based on TURN or STUN, since you don’t need to log in. What makes it suspicious?

Edit: I did some reading on their blog, and they only mention something like STUN and specifically say it’s only for connection, not for relaying, so I don’t think they use TURN. In that case, the camera is streaming video directly to your phone, so it sounds like it’s not ever passing through a ReoLink server. The benefit to ReoLink is they only have to run a STUN server, which is incredibly cheap (bandwidth wise), and the benefit to you is that the video never goes through anyone else’s server. The drawback is if you have a really restrictive firewall, or some funky address translation, you might not be able to establish a connection.

[–] Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The problem is that it can only be speculated how they work, because they have not published it. That is quite suspicious in my book.

I personally would avoid reolink and use rtsp + frigate + ha, to have full control with known open source selfhosting solution.

I understand that people like the easy setup, but if you already do selfhosting, it isn't that big jump.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 hours ago

Sure, but I’ve tried Frigate, and it’s not even close to Reolink in terms of ease of use. It was a giant pain in the ass to get it working to detect people in the camera. And even then, getting a push notification is something I couldn’t even figure out. And using it on a phone is really bad UX.

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