Any recommendations for locally hosted cameras that I don’t have to incriminate myself to Big Tech to use? Weed farmin’ is still a federal crime so I don’t need Jeff Bezos watching my footage.
Anything that is poe and you can block it’s access to the Internet. Reolink is my go to and then I change it’s DNS to a dummy one and the block it’s Internet on my router.
A raspberry pi zero with a camera connected to your local network. And powered by a small solar charged battery. Put it in a clear a plastic contaner for weatherproofing
Ubiquiti cameras are amazing. They’re a bit pricey to get started, but the data is all local (and will work air gapped from the internet). At a minimum you’ll need a Cloud Key and a camera of choice: https://store.ui.com/us/en?category=all-cameras-nvrs
If you can see your plot from your house, you can go with an indoor camera angled thru a window (that’s what I do and it works great).
I haven’t seen a better works right out of the box camera system that keeps your data local.
Disagree. They are easy to get up and running but they’re very, very expensive and their quality is mid-low. I love unifi/ubiquiti and have a ton of their stuff in my house but I won’t buy any more cameras from them.
I use BlueIris (one time cost for software) and a mix of cameras that link up using RTSP protocol. If you search for BlueIris compatible cameras you can see big lists of cameras, but at the end of the day most anything that’s RTSP is g2g (it can be a bit more complicated but generally if something is listed as RTSP compliant you will be able to get audio/video, and usually pan/tilt/zoom if the camera has it). I actually think that if you just want to use one camera you could just access it via VLC and its IP address, but I’ve never done it personally.
There’s a YouTube channel called The Hook Up, guy does INCREDIBLE camera reviews.
Personally I use a smorgasbord of cameras, mostly from amcrest, TP-link, hikvision. Probably others that I can’t think of. Another commenter recommended ubiquiti/unifi cameras. I do NOT recommend them, but they are very easy to get going. Problem is they’re SUPER expensive and their quality is meh. In order to use them you either need to self-host the controller software or buy another expensive piece of hardware to go with the overpriced cameras themselves. On top of all that they are NOT RTSP compliant so you can’t really use them outside of their ecosystem, which is BS imo.
I don’t trust Chinese-made low cost cameras to not call home so none of them have access to the open internet, and I can view my cameras remotely using a VPN. Everything is fully locally hosted, no cloud shit.
Also, you can buy NVR+camera kits that don’t call home. Analog ones with 4 cameras are probably pretty cheap these days and the video quality will be good. You’ll have to do some digging to find out if a model is fully locally controlled but I know they do exist (and you can probably get a full NVR with cameras for less than the price of a single unifi bullet camera and a cloud key).
Any recommendations for locally hosted cameras that I don’t have to incriminate myself to Big Tech to use? Weed farmin’ is still a federal crime so I don’t need Jeff Bezos watching my footage.
Anything that is poe and you can block it’s access to the Internet. Reolink is my go to and then I change it’s DNS to a dummy one and the block it’s Internet on my router.
Stuff like Reolink or Hikvision PoE cameras are local, but I still put them behind a firewall to block egress.
A raspberry pi zero with a camera connected to your local network. And powered by a small solar charged battery. Put it in a clear a plastic contaner for weatherproofing
Ubiquiti cameras are amazing. They’re a bit pricey to get started, but the data is all local (and will work air gapped from the internet). At a minimum you’ll need a Cloud Key and a camera of choice: https://store.ui.com/us/en?category=all-cameras-nvrs
If you can see your plot from your house, you can go with an indoor camera angled thru a window (that’s what I do and it works great).
I haven’t seen a better works right out of the box camera system that keeps your data local.
Disagree. They are easy to get up and running but they’re very, very expensive and their quality is mid-low. I love unifi/ubiquiti and have a ton of their stuff in my house but I won’t buy any more cameras from them.
For non-tinkerers eufy works well: you purchase the camera and a local base station. Bought it for my mom.
For myself, I use no-brand IP cameras from aliexpress, and motion on a raspberry pi as base station.
Didn’t it come out that Eufy was sending your footage to Amazon?
There was a way to request an unencrypted video stream via their web portal (1).
I like Axis cameras. They’re pricey when new, but not bad on eBay. Combine that with iSpy and hardware of your choice for recording.
I use BlueIris (one time cost for software) and a mix of cameras that link up using RTSP protocol. If you search for BlueIris compatible cameras you can see big lists of cameras, but at the end of the day most anything that’s RTSP is g2g (it can be a bit more complicated but generally if something is listed as RTSP compliant you will be able to get audio/video, and usually pan/tilt/zoom if the camera has it). I actually think that if you just want to use one camera you could just access it via VLC and its IP address, but I’ve never done it personally.
There’s a YouTube channel called The Hook Up, guy does INCREDIBLE camera reviews.
Personally I use a smorgasbord of cameras, mostly from amcrest, TP-link, hikvision. Probably others that I can’t think of. Another commenter recommended ubiquiti/unifi cameras. I do NOT recommend them, but they are very easy to get going. Problem is they’re SUPER expensive and their quality is meh. In order to use them you either need to self-host the controller software or buy another expensive piece of hardware to go with the overpriced cameras themselves. On top of all that they are NOT RTSP compliant so you can’t really use them outside of their ecosystem, which is BS imo.
I don’t trust Chinese-made low cost cameras to not call home so none of them have access to the open internet, and I can view my cameras remotely using a VPN. Everything is fully locally hosted, no cloud shit.
Also, you can buy NVR+camera kits that don’t call home. Analog ones with 4 cameras are probably pretty cheap these days and the video quality will be good. You’ll have to do some digging to find out if a model is fully locally controlled but I know they do exist (and you can probably get a full NVR with cameras for less than the price of a single unifi bullet camera and a cloud key).