I continue to be amazed that there is not a reasonably priced, open source, audited, local-first solution, which doesn’t require a significant personal investment of time to install and maintain.
Local-first cameras are super cheap and easy to find. Most just run their own local RTSP server, which you can connect to live with VLC, homeassistant, whatever. OpenIPC is like ddwrt for ip cameras, here is the supported devices page: https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/guide-support...
But unless you're Richard Stallman, go with the closed source Reolink RTSP camera, which is about $100 and used by big corporate installs. It can integrate with the cloud, but you can set it up to just have each camera run a RTSP server with user/pass auth. You have to secure your own network.
But there isn't a really great open source platform for the kind of multi cam security that businesses might need. You have to do your own storage. But grab four reolinks, send the feeds to homeassistant, and most homeowners will be fine.
I have spent days searching for an affordable solution that meets my requirements. I know there are a lot of people that want the same thing, have done their own research, and have reached a similar conclusion. What we want simply does not exist.
I will stop posting this kind of comment when someone finally gives me a straight answer, but no one has done that yet.
Edit: Another comment mentioned https://gitlab.com/Shinobi-Systems/Shinobi which I haven’t explored but am definitely going to also try out now.
I don't have time to mess around with hacking a camera to do RTSP and then figure out how to set up and use something unfriendly like ZoneMinder.
The margins on these devices are already pretty high because they're enterprise and business focused - I "buy once cry once"'d when I bought my <vendor>* drive for the home. I would have bought a different vendor if I was forced to pay an additional premium for a render capable CPU.
(* - I'm probably tin foil hating here, but realized from a security posture perspective I don't want to publicly state the vendors I use in my network.)