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Comment by ensignavenger | Hacker News Reader

There are alternative cameras that don't have the same privacy concerns.

Yup. I absolutely love my cameras. I wouldn't have set them up without a home server to isolate them, though.

The problem with those is they're easily stolen during a home invasion.

Nest has the best experience as far as I can tell. The person recognition works fairly well, so I’m not getting alerts for every rabbit or blown tree branch that wanders into view.

Nest is also my favorite. I just wish they didn't completely abandon the main Nest app and didn't force the inferior and convoluted Google Home app as the mandatory app necessary for the latest gen cameras. Such a squandered opportunity.

Can you recommend some?

Eufy, which records locally. Doesn't have as much "AI" though.

I have several Eufy cams and while their hardware is excellent, the software leaves much to be desired.

My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.

The logitech circle view ones are pretty good

Anything the integrates with homekit secure video will be e2e encrypted

UniFi cameras are amazing. Superb video quality (better then so called "professional" cameras from the regular security companies), easy to setup (but still an order of magnitude more work then a Ring), self hostable, and from my experience highly reliable.

Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor.

The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in older models is stored on a very cheap USB flash drive, and I believe they write logs to it too. Mine failed a few months before warranty expired so I just replaced it with an SSD and SATA->USB 3 adapter I had laying around. Works great, is snappy, and should hopefully last quite a bit longer.

For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.

The streams don't come from the cameras in that scenario either, they get proxied by the NVR.

Synology has some fairly strong products in this space.

A fairly cheap NAS from them for local storage, and then basically any ip camera you can find will mostly just work. (NAS I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay-DiskStation-DS220-Diskle...)

They offer surveillance station (https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance) as a free app for most of their models.

My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE switch) cost me under $1000, and I get pretty much every feature that most of these cloud camera services offer.

- Remote viewing on my phone (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synology.D...)

- Activity alerts and optional triggers for recording

- Viewing through any browser

- Multiple user accounts

Plus if I want it, Surveillance station has a whole host of other features that I currently don't need, but are nice to have (ex: automated cloud backups, offsite storage, CMS, Action rules, etc)

As a nice little bonus - I pay zero in monthly costs for this outside of the power to run the cameras & NAS

My initial setup cost ran slightly higher than something like Nest or Google Home (ex: I paid 1k vs the roughly 400 it would have cost to buy the cameras from a cloud service) but 4 years in I'm now in the positive on the investment, since I don't have a recurring 14/month subscription charge.

So long story short - It's still my data, it's costing me less over time, and I get feature parity.

The downside is it requires a little more configuration and setup.

I actually own a Synology NAS. Weird. Never cared about the app but is sounds really nice. Thank you. I'll check it out.

Reolink have cameras which keep the video local, but support RTSP and can upload video to an FTP server (old school, I know) of your choice. I run my own FTP server and keep the video streams in DigitalOcean spaces with a 24 hours object expiration policy, fairly cheap NVR.

Reolink can work with Synology, I believe.

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