I want to setup a camera monitoring for my house and some rooms. I need to bee able to view the cameras remotely and and also do recording if possible. I could find some camera brands like dahua cams but having briefly tested them they. Seem to rely on acwmtralized cloud and proprietary visualization software.

What are you recommendation? This is not a professional setup I would at max have 3 cameras.

  • kensand@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    672·
    3 months ago

    I’ve personally been quite pleased with the combination of Frigate and some Amcrest POE cameras. Just make sure the cameras you are getting support RTSP though and you should be able to use them with Frigate.

    Also make sure you block the cameras from reaching the public internet using your firewall, and only make them reachable from your Frigate host. Personally I use a VLAN with no internet access and enforce tagging at the switch level (i.e. don’t trust the cameras to maintain their own VLAN) settings.

    • Drathro@dormi.zoneEnglish
      8·
      3 months ago

      AmCrest and Frigate together are SO good. Integrating Frigate with Home Assistant was also insanely easy for quick viewing and notifications. That initial Frigate config is a bit of a bear- but once you’re past that I cannot speak more highly of it.

      • kensand@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        8·
        3 months ago

        Frankly, once you get more than just a few cameras, being able to edit a config file is so much better than having to click through settings for literally hours like with Shinobi or Motioneye.

        • Drathro@dormi.zoneEnglish
          7·
          3 months ago

          Very true. But brute force checking through tons of different settings for each camera you need to configure is not fun. I couldn’t seem to find any kind of “known working configs” database or anything either. Every camera seems to be different in what it expects, outputs, authenticates, etc. Once it’s set up, I agree, maintaining the config is easier. Having all your cameras match in model and firmware version probably makes the whole endeavor MUCH easier.

    • TheOneCurly@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      I have the exact same setup. It works perfectly and integrates really well into home assistant if that’s your thing. Getting a coral TPU also makes object detection really easy even on low power hardware.

    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      enforce tagging at the switch level (i.e. don’t trust the cameras to maintain their own VLAN) settings.

      Very smart solution!

    • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      HomeAssistant + Frigate combo is just plain awesome. You can leverage the automations of HA through Frigate’s AI detection, so you get things like notifications.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I see several Amcrest options that look like they have integrated AI object detection. Frigate on the other hand says you should get a “Google Coral Accelerator”. Do you know if Frigate (or RTSP, I guess) has a way to leverage the built in detection capabilities of a camera (assuming they are built in, and not being offloaded to the cloud)? Or am I better of looking at the “dumb” Amcrest cameras, and just assuming all processing for all cameras will happen on my Frigate hardware?

      • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        Coral Acceletor is only needed if you run setup that does not have GPU or enough CPU. Spare laptop usually has enough power to handle AI detection, but RasPi doesn’t. I run mine in CPU at rack server.

        Cameras own detections are limited in my experience, and it is much harder to integrate to anything else, like HomeAssistant for notification & automation

      • K3CANEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I know I’m a bit late to the conversation, so I don’t know if this is still helpful… But I have a camera with “AI Detection” built into it and it appears to send alerts via its ONVIF connection. I’ve disabled motion and other detectors on my NVR (AgentNVR) and instead configured it to just wait for an alert from the camera itself to start recording. It’s been working quite well.

        My initial plan was to use a coral TPU and frigate, but the Coral/Gasket drivers appear to be pretty old and I couldn’t get them to work properly, myself.