Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras

binaryphile@kbin.social to Technology@beehaw.org – 210 points –
Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras
wired.com

They’re affordable and ubiquitous, but homeowners shouldn’t be able to act as vigilantes.

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I just grabbef a generic IP camera, connected it over ethernet, and firewalled it so it could not make connections out to my home network or the internet. Turns out it just uses an mpeg stream for the video, so recording it is just a matter of running curl on a server. Any network camera that does not depend on a server should work fine for this type of stuff.

Yeah, this. I do the same with my Reolink cameras - block all external access and I use a Frigate docker container to record footage to my storage. Bonus is I have Frigate using a Coral TPU, so it's got some really accurate, and fast, inferencing/recognition baked in.

Could I do this with an RPi 4 B 4GB, I wonder? I’m just About to have mine arrive and I would love to have a couple CCTV cameras in my place.

As long as you are just doing capture and aren't attempting to do anything where a re-encode of the video stream is needed then absolutely. You'll need something other than a microSD card though to write the video too.

Brilliant, yah I’d just want it captured and stored on like a WD NAS HDD attached to a computer in the basement.

Or if I ever get my ass in gear and set up my GSA…

Yes, elit does take some messing around to get working though, so I wouldn't recommend unless you want to spend a bit messing around with configuring a server. (Make sure to back up the pi's SD card so if it fails you can easily replace it)

Oooo thanks for reminding me to back up my PiHole too!

i'm also thinking to just take a cheap reolink and put over the door - but it would be cooler if there was a screen inside that turns on when someone is detected outside (even by an ultra cheap PIR sensor, don't need sophisticated AI recognition stuff)