Ring is a $300 purchase and takes an hour to install. This would take me a few weekends and would cost thousands of dollars. Cloud centralization makes things easier and cheaper, by orders of magnitude.
A company could drop a camera and a small NAS box, and have it all work over the local WiFi.
I haven't looked into it, but I suspect there are several vendors who already do this.
It would get more complicated to support accessing it while away from home, admittedly. I don't know if that's an important feature for this application.
That's the killer feature. What good is a home surveillance system if you have to be there to use it?
If you setup a company to do this, you will quickly find you are a customer service and call center company, NOT a security tech company.
This is a huge feature which I've solved using an IPSec VPN. This is not something that's easy for regular people to do though, so it's not a universal solution.
If someone made a router that could easily provision VPN access for a device (e.g., generate a sensible OpenVPN config or something) it would make this setup a LOT easier.
Been there, done that.
Yes, it's possible. No, it's not easy. I've been working as a software dev for like 10 years now and I would happily purchase Ring instead of pulling my hair out for a whole weekend trying to yak-shave[1] my way to a hacked together security camera system.
[1] https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/
Edit: Everyone, just read the replies to my original comment and you will see why Ring is better. There's a million different ways to setup a home camera system, each with their own intricacies and challenges. THIS is why Ring is better. It's the ONE solution that ties together all this technical bullshit that nobody really wants to deal with (unless you're passionate about networking. Which is probably a lot of the users on this board. Which is why I'm probably getting crushed with downvotes).
This reminds me of 23 and Me which acts like it's helping you but, by signing up, you agree to help Big Pharma and cops keep track of you.
No cloud dependence, subscription needed or extra internet bandwidth use.
I own a few. I'm pretty sure you need to talk to centralized servers in order to hit your cameras, especially remotely - the time it matters most. Did I miss something?
I am very capable of all of those things and I don't agree.
To install a camera on my porch somewhere, I'd need first to run power to it, which is a difficult proposition that would probably mean I need to hire an electrician to do it right, as I'm not confident at all in my ability to properly do electrical wiring in places where it needs to be properly weatherproofed. And adding electrical to a near-as-makes-no-difference 80 year old house would look pretty hideous. Then, need to set up a server with redundant spinny storage and offsite backup, which, while not being terribly expensive these days, isn't particularly cheap either. And I don't even know how to begin approaching the mobile app notification issue. Doable, I'm sure, but does Blue Iris have notifications and remote access for viewing built in?
Or, alternatively, I paid $160 for a Ring doorbell and installed it in place of my existing doorbell in an hour or so.
I wish I had more control over it, and I _really_ wish they had an open public API. But at the same time, from a time/money investment point of view, getting the Ring was an obvious move.
http://www.veracityglobal.com/resources/articles-and-white-p...
Because they're behind glass, using the built-in IR illumination is out of the question. Instead I use an LED bulb outside to provide light for the camera to see even in day mode.
It's not ideal by any measure, but it works OK enough.
If it were an option, I'd run PoE to proper outdoor cameras.
this just in. Ring is also a "ceiling cat". https://9to5google.com/2019/01/10/ring-camera-live-feed-acce...
> Ring is a $300 purchase and takes an hour to install. This would take me a few weekends and would cost thousands of dollars. Cloud centralization makes things easier and cheaper, by orders of magnitude.
I have a number of "old school" network cameras and an on-site DVR, it doesn't take "a few weekends" to set everything up.
Adding a camera is simply a matter of following the instructions to connect it to the network. This would be the same process for a Ring or an "old school" camera. Adding a camera to Blue Iris is a 5-15 minute job, depending on how much tweaking you want to do to the motion detection settings.
In terms of implementing from scratch, I picked up a refurbished Windows 10 Pro machine, set up and updated Windows, installed Blue Iris, and added my cameras, in an evening.
Cost-wise, my setup is more expensive than a single Ring camera. However, my incremental costs are a lot cheaper since I can buy sub-$100 cameras instead of $300 ones. There's also no monthly fee, which is nice.
This is definitely a consideration though. More cameras and/or higher resolution cameras will result in more power consumption or require a beefier machine.
Not something I want to waste my time on.
It's a good consideration though and a definite advantage for the cloud services.