The issue is that the “easy” solutions are not private, and often not secure either. If you aren’t going to set up your own cloud, you will have to use someone else’s, and will lose control and privacy as a result. I would rather not have security cameras at all in that case.
Yes
I disagree. I don’t run AI on my camera feed and don’t it. It’s there to be reviewed and/or used for insurance purposes should something of interest happen. In any case this isn’t particularly difficult to add to Frigate.
This is the an awesome “question” post. Thank you for sharing so many resources, asking these questions while also walking us through your process. This helps others such as myself who know even less about DYI security camera solutions than you!
Oh, that makes me so very happy to hear! Thank you so much in turn for making this reply, put a big smile on my face.
And speaking of, I want to say an additional huge ‘thank you’ as well to everyone in this thread for your suggestions, advice and resources! All the context and elaborations for your thoughts are a big help, and I’m so grateful you’ve taken the time.
I think we’re going way too deep on this eli5 thread, but whatever.
This is not true. I use the shitty “eufy security 2C 2-Cam Kit” which is absurdly popular on Amazon (Canada) and integrates ok with HA via custom HACS integrations. This is a hard requirement for me as I don’t use FCM, so I need to proxy my push notifications through HA automations → ntfy.
Yes, eufy had some recent security/privacy blowups over storing camera feed snapshots in publicly accessible places. I’m absolute not here to promote for anyone to buy eufy cams!
I think your use case is super niche then. Most people, including me and OP from the sounds of it, need some sort of motion detection.
Personally I have HA automations to turn on alarm mode at night or when me and my wife leave home. In alarm mode I get notifications whenever motion is detected by my patio + porch. Detected motion also triggers the lights to turn if it’s dark out.
You’re repeating what @SkewedZeppelin is writing, but I’m looking to understand the reasoning.
I just read over Reolink - Home Assistant and it reads that you can put an SD card into your reolink cameras to record the video should you need to access it later. You’re now essentially cutting out the NVR entirely and saving yourself a bunch of money.
You can then integrate those cameras with your HA via the integration to allow you to control them. You can install Frigate, which it sounds like is just a process that runs on top of HA, that can continuously watch your RSTP camera feed (need AI accelerator hardware here) for you to send events to your HA that you can act on via HA automations. I personally would need these automations to be able to send push notifications to myself via ntfy (this is for UnifiedPush which is a push notification replacement for degoogled users).
Reolink cameras don’t need internet access according to the integration docs. What’s the problem with this kind of setup?
please, please, please nobody rely on this.
your SD card will fail, you will likely not notice it, when you need the recording, the chance it won’t exist is too high
they are entirely distinct.
I use Frigate, but I do not use HA at all.
Frigate supports Web Push as long as you have a secure origin (ie. HTTPS) available
Yes, likely. But a decent brand + 2TB one should last you long enough in the meantime of you figuring out something better down the road. Just don’t overflow it with small constant metadata files and you should be good.
Not everybody can pull out an 8 HDD RAID setup with remote redundancy.
Everybody have their own knowledge/needs/budget.
I’m sorry, what?
Waste $200-300 on an SD card instead of investing in a good NVR setup?
If for whatever reason someone wants to go this route, you can get 128GB/256GB “industrial” class cards for like 2x normal price. (eg. $40)
One or two 2TB drives is more than enough for a basic setup.
Lol, very much nvm yeah: not sure why I thought that an SD card of 2TB would cost around 50€. Long time I haven’t checked the prices of those I guess.
I do hence very much agree with you.
But a smaller one can also be fine if you encode into H265 or in 720p too.
I would hope that the HA integration could catch such hardware failures, but I could be wrong. The selling point is one could spend $20 for 128GB SD card for each camera or $200+ for an NVR setup. I would also not like to keep a bunch of hardware “boxes” sitting around if I don’t have to.
I’m sure they can be separate. I was referring to how the HA integration would behave in which case I would assume (dunno for sure) that they would run together on the same hardware.
This is cool to know, but it doesn’t help for degoogled users like myself. Web push is not compatible with UnifiedPush, so you’d need some translation proxy to tie the two implementations together.
I think that there are a bizillion of ways to send a notification when it comes down to owning the hardware and getting around with some coding skills (isn’t MQTT used for that purpose? ).
Like I said I’m only talking about the case where you do have a central NVR, but I do also think having a central NVR is the proper way to go about things.
This was rocket science for me to understand exactly how it would work, but it sounds like you’re correct and you can tie your UnifiedPush-based notifications to Frigate’s web push implementation by subscribing with one of those two browsers. TIL!
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