My girlfriend is be very interested in putting Blink (Amazon) cameras up around our property. I am not interested in paying Amazon to keep our security footage.
What I’d like to do is have motion activated internet connected cameras around the property that somehow send footage to a server (I don’t know if that’s the correct term, I’m kind of an idiot) that I keep on the property.
So I have three questions:
- is this the right forum to be asking about self hosting security footage?
- does anyone here have experience doing this and would they be willing to send some pointers my way?
- is this a feasible DIY project or am I better served paying for a service?
I’ve done a little digging into self hosting and it’s not cheap, but I think it will be cheaper than paying a subscription. And safer too, which is rad.
Thank you all!
My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.
Phones and their batteries aren’t made for this. Trying to run a phone 24/7 will likely result in the phone dying very quickly and raise the chances of it exploding.
My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.
OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.
Ubiquiti is good, if you have the money. I have an 8TB HDD in my UDM-PRO recording 24/7 the footage from 6 cameras. It isn’t a cheap solution but it works and it’s local.
How long does it take to fill that storage?
Depends on your setup, I used to have 4 cameras that only saved when motion was detected and they filled 1tb in about a month.
Cameras in general aren’t as easy as cheap plugs to deal with. There’s the OpenIPC project but it seems only to support very specific chips that are sometimes older, hard to find or not price/feature competitive like something such as what TP-Link offers.
For what’s worth TP-Link Tapo cameras (TC70, 71 etc.) aren’t that bad when it comes to privacy, there isn’t much “cloud”. They do require you to use their mobile app and cloud to setup the camera but afterwards you can just run them on an isolated VLAN / firewall them from the internet completely and you’ll still be able to use all of the camera’s features. Those cameras provide a generic rtsp stream that even VLC can play and there’s also a good HA integration that provides all features of the TP-Link Tapo application like pan / move / download recordings from the camera’s SD card and whatnot 100% locally / offline.
I particularly like their cameras because they’re really cheap and decent, while not perfect in terms of privacy they’ve a good trade off when it comes to price but require initial cloud setup. They also have wireless versions, ethernet versions and a cheap PoE splitter will be good for those.
They do require you to use their mobile app and cloud to setup the camera but afterwards you can just run them on an isolated VLAN / firewall them from the internet completely
Do you have any good guides or articles diving deeper on this? I was also pondering Home Assistant - it supports tapo devices, but I don’t know much about it. Would that be a possible solution?
and you’ll still be able to use all of the camera’s features
would this include a live cam feed?
Home Assistant - it supports tapo devices, but I don’t know much about it. Would that be a possible solution?
I just told you it works fine under Home Assistant and provided a link to the integration. https://github.com/JurajNyiri/HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control
would this include a live cam feed?
Yes. It includes, live feed, the ability to move the camera, ring the bell, turn on privacy mode, enable patrol mode… and use the camera’s sensors. There’s also an option to automatically download recorded video on the camera’s SD card every x hours or days. Here’s the full list of entities available under HA for those cameras (note that your camera must support the feature):
Sorry, didn’t click the link, didn’t realize HA stands for Home Assistance there. As you can tell, pretty new to this. Thanks for the answer!
Sure, no problem. The bottom line is that it works very well for the low price of those cameras and I couldn’t be happier.
If you wouldn’t mind, could you share how you managed to make the Tapo cameras work with Home Assistant? I finally got it set up and while I had no isse with bulbs, cameras just can’t be adde through the TP Link integration. There are no Tapo cameras listed as supported on the Home Assistant web eithet
As I said before, you’ve to install this: https://github.com/JurajNyiri/HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control then go to Settings > Devices > Add and search for Tapo.
I guess that’s the issue - I assume this needs to be installed on the hardware running the Home Assistant. I went with the easy option of getting the Home Assistant Green hub, so I don’t assume there is a way for me to make it work… or it’s just beyond my capabilities
Thanks anyway for your patience with me, unknowingly asking the same damn thing over and over like a dummy.
