Anyone know of self-hostable security cameras?

nottelling@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 137 points –

Edit: ideally wifi cameras that I can solar power.

Looking to replace my Arlo cameras with something self-hostable. Arlo lets you store on a USB stick, but there's no way to get out from under their cloud, which gets more expensive all the time.

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What do you mean "self-hosted security camera" exactly? Open source camera? DIY camera?

Or are you looking for self-hosted NVR software? If so, many people already gave you suggestions. My recommendation - don't focus on ZoneMinder. It's ugly software. Instead, use Shinobi for more classic software or Frigate with Google TPU accelerator. Both lightweight enough.

Myself I have a mix of HikVision and Dahua, recorded/analyzed by Frugate. Everything works like a charm.

And also, I've disabled internet access for all the cameras, so they couldn't call home. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I had no real idea how to phrase it, but all these posts have helped. What I was actually focused on when I posted was mainly hardware that can do what the Arlo cameras do:

  • Wifi + battery/solar my house is old and hardwires are a pain in the ass.
  • High def, preferably 4k, but 1080 is ok.
  • Night vision, color or not doesn't matter
  • Motion-activated, and preferably some way to filter out and not trigger on things like passing traffic cars.
  • As small a form-factor as possible.

The Reolink hardware mentioned below seems to fit the bill hardware-wise.

I hadn't even really considered the software, as I don't need a lot of features. All I need is to use motion-activated capture to stream to some local storage, and an ability to view a live-stream when I want one. But it looks like there's a lot of options I need to consider.

You're looking for a self-hosted NVR (Network Video Recorder). The best I've found and use in a number of customer's is Blue Iris, and it'll work with any ONVIF-enabled cameras, but it costs 100/yr and only runs on a windows machine. I have desperately tried open-source NVRs that will work on Linux but none of them are even in the same universe as Blue Iris for functionality and ease of use.

Wireless cameras are generally terrible so if you can hardwire them in any way, I would go with that. People have had fairly good luck with Wyse cameras for wireless, I can't speak to it. See the Selfhosted Podcast for various discussions on cameras to use with NVRs, with a focus on Blue Iris.

I have desperately tried open-source NVRs that will work on Linux but none of them are even in the same universe as Blue Iris for functionality and ease of use.

Have you tried Shinobi? I've used it for quite some time until I switched to Frigate. It isn't broken tho.

Also, anything special with Blue Iris? Note that it can be ran on Linux because there is Docker image that uses wine.

I did have it working under Wine myself, not with docker. The docker image is news to me, I might have to give it a try. What I did notice about running under Wine was that the web interface wouldn't load the good quality version, just the basic HTML version with the sad camera controls and interface. It worked, but wasn't great.

I did try Shinobi, it had a really odd interface. While it worked, I did not find it enjoyable to use and it was pretty rudimentary compared to BI.

For NVR - it looks like you are after Frigate with object detection.

For cameras - as long as it has RTSP support, then you should be fine. Doesn't really matter of what kind of brand it is. You can always block internet access for a camera in your router.