For non cloud cams, someone posted here a while back about thingno firmware, takes cheap cams off the cloud. Works great on a wyze cam and was a gamechanger for me. Sttrroonngglllyyy recommend
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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I had never heard of this so went looking. Super useful stuff here!
A link for anyone interested: https://thingino.com/
I see it supports many cameras, but you need to pull them apart and use a serial hookup to flash the firmware... but for the wyze cams and a few others you can flash them directly with an SD card.
I liked how cheap the wyze cams were but desperately wanted to get them offline. This was my silver bullet.
Holy sht. I know what im doing this weekend.
Oh thank god. This solves my problem of no good integrated cam hardware on the market that isn't cloudified or a huge security hole.
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New to me & bookmarked. I am sure I have some crap lying around that this would work with.
Thank you!
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Frigate + Reolink (or actually Frigate-approved cams)
Amcrest seems to be the cheapest and I have good experience with them and Frigate
Used them before, but you have to be kinda careful with Amcrest, every once in awhile they throw one out that is especially shitty to self host.
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My amcrest cameras have been good, but hikvision has been even better. They're sneaky though so make sure they're on an isolated vlan.
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Slightly off topic and something I read from somewhere else, but make sure whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn't usable for any police / insurance claims.
I'd guess all systems do this now, but just wanted it to be on your checklist of features.
If the camera doesn't do it, then the storage server must.
(And make sure the clock is sync'd to something 😉)
Noted, good point, thanks!
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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.
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.
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.
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I recently added two reolink cameras to my setup. Out of the box, they would not let me assign them IPs, they did not even try to get an IP from my network. They needed to be connected to via the mobile app the first time, then reconfigured for IP. Wasn't a great user experience even if the cameras are now fine.
Onboarding a networked device should not require a mobile app, fill stop.
But you still kept the cameras and didn't return them... Where's the full stop? lol
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Reolink camera
Nice, had heard the name, but looking at their site, didn't realize they had so many options, and no cloud requirement! Awesome, looking like the likely option, thanks!
I had 2 of these for years ran back to Synology surveillance station and they were great. I've expanded to 6 cameras now and bought the Reolink NVR. It works great, with good picture quality. Pretty inexpensive setup overall. No downtime. Very happy with Reolink.
This is maybe controversial, but I love the Ubiquiti security stuff. Cameras (interior and exterior) doorbells, etc, it's all great. Pricey, but you get what you pay for.
And the data can stay local or be accessible via their services.
I chose to go local only, grabbed their UNVR and populated it with 4x 2TB drives and it has enough space to handle 7 cameras HD history for about a month.
I've experimented with ubiquiti cameras and for the most part I find them very overpriced for their quality point. They're good cameras, but they're not ONVIF compatible so if you want to get into their (super overpriced and limited) ecosystem you won't be able to intermix other cameras easily.
A good example is their doorbell camera. It's just not good. And they don't have more than one model, so if you want a good one you're buying something else, that won't work in their software, so now you're using two systems to watch your cameras.
I'm glad they work for you, but I don't recommend getting into their camera ecosystem.
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Frigate is popular.
I used to use ZoneMinder, it worked well, but you must be very familiar with onvif, primary/secondary channels, and key frames for it to work well.
I only switched to frigate because of the person/animal detection. It's ok, but it does need some polish in a few areas like event retention, and it could stand some more approachable documentation.
Used Zoneminder for a 20 camera store CCTV setup and can confirm, it's complicated but powerful. I wouldn't use it for less than 4 cams.
The alternative I'd use personally is https://motion-project.github.io/ though. Doesn't make much difference.
I have a Reolink PoE camera. It works fine. As far as I can tell, it only uses the internet to check for updates and set the time, but I have it blocked off anyway. Home Assistant was actually causing it to check for updates, too, so that got disabled.
I don't record, so I can't help you there.
I will say that is a pain to get Home Assistant to display real-time video instead of a slide show.
you managed to get it in realtime though? may i ask how?
I haven't, that's the problem. It seems like it's possible, but I've given up trying for the moment.
Eh? Shouldn't it be real time already?
this is my configuration:
- camera_view: live
type: picture-glance
entities: []
camera_image: camera.cam_profile000_mainstream
tap_action:
action: none
I am using ONVIF integration for the camera.
Mine even play audio
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Can we pin one of these posts? The same thing gets asked even few days and the answers don't change nearly that frequently
Sigh, unfortunately not.
You should see the Linux community asking about which distro to use - now that's where a pinned post is needed...
Huh? There's a post about exactly that pinned at the tops of !linux@lemmy.ml for quite a while. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
Well, slap me sideways with a boxed edition of Windows XP SP3.
I never knew that!
Thanks for sharing.
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For hardware, anything that can provide a local rtsp stream is a good place to start. I run cheap and cheerful mix of tapo, unbranded and homebrew esp32 cams. Offload the motion/object detection and alerts to something that can pull in the feeds, and isolate the cams to local network only.
WiFi usually ok, but at least hardwire the power to save future grief.
Using frigate to manage mine, which is running under Homeassistant - another project worth looking up.
A few images, featuring Freddie the visitor:
Tell me more about your homebrew esp32 cams, please!
Ok so the combination is:
- This camera board
- This external antenna
- This project
- A shell I designed myself in SketchUp (skp download). Note that's not the final version, as I lost some design files.
And the finished item:
All assembled, they will give a decent enough feed to frigate for the basics. Just don't expect miracles in the resolution or framerate departments. 3fps does fine for my use case of tracking critters.
Neat, thanks!
I'm not thrilled about the camera quality (compared to a purpose-built surveillance cam with 4k and good low-light performance) and I wish it had PoE, but damn, can't beat that price!
(Side note: does anybody else find it weird that PoE is so uncommon and/or adds so much to the cost of these IoT dev boards? I get that normal people don't want the hassle of running cable, but it feels like the hole in the market is bigger than it should be.)
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Dahua and Hikvision have great cameras but of course you shouldn't trust them. Block them at the firewall. I bought mine a few years ago and preferred Hikvision for its better built in webserver for initial configuration.
On the hosting side you run Frigate, Zoneminder or BlueIris (Windows) to control the cameras and record their streams.
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Any cam with an rtsp stream is fine. Host frigate on your server point it to the cams you can get audio and video and object detection pretty easily. I also recommend taking an extra step and creating a firewall rule to block the cams' inbound/outbound internet traffic.
When I needed this I reached for whatever generic rtmp cameras were well rated. Blocked them from external access (including outgoing!) at the firewall level and used Zoneminder and some custom scripts to monitor.
I tried to use Shinobi as my PVR for a while but dealt with a lot of usability and stability issues. Switching to Frigate has been much better. Configuration can be a bit difficult but it's rock solid and really great. Plus the home assistant integration is top notch. I've had a lot of luck with Amcrest cameras and also managed to use a cheap Tapo camera within my setup.
Make sure any cameras you get are ONVIF compatible. That'll give you the widest usability.
And while it's great to be self-hosted, I've never found anything as good as BlueIris for camera software, even if it does cost $50/yr. I run it in a Dockurr/windows container, there's a few projects out there that make Dockur easier to set up.
I personally use Frigate, which is default free, but has a plus tier for $50 a year (has custom AI training/models instead of default’s standard model).
Personally has all the features I’d want, curious what BlueIris brings, I’ve heard a bit about it.
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I found out reolink cameras have an official integration partnership with home assistant. I just installed my front door camera.
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