I don’t have yet any preferences. Cheap, easy to set up, secure. What do you use and can recommend?

    • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I use Amcrest, mostly because the guy who makes frigate recommended them, and has affiliate links on his site. As a software developer myself, I have to say frigate (and HA) are two jewels of open source software and so I’m happy to support them however I can.

      That being said, the cameras work well and are easy to integrate with both frigate and HA. They all try to phone home at first, but stop if you tell them to (I’ve confirmed this by monitoring the traffic on my dns servers).

      I couldn’t find a privacy friendly wifi camera with a big enough battery to run continuously, so I ended up building my own with a solar panel, an inverter, and a 9ah lithium battery that sits on a fence post at the end of my driveway. It was a fun project, but I wish I could buy it.

      Another small gripe is that the PTZ cameras from Amcrest all seem to be crazy expensive or have mixed reviews, so I’ve just held off on those for now.

    • dmtalon@infosec.pub
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      6 months ago

      I’ve got amcrest and I integrate them into HA via mqtt using blue iris.

      But amcrest cameras need something like pihole to help block all their taking to the home base

    • Convict45@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’ve owned a bunch of Foscam cameras, a sub-brand owned by Amcrest.

      Amcrest and its Foscam sub-brand seem very interested in getting access to your cameras, have less capable and less convenient software, and the cameras themselves seem less well built than Reolink.

      I bought a half a dozen V1 Wyze cams, and at least two of them have failed. I won’t touch that brand again. I also would never have used Wyze at all except for the exploit that allowed custom firmware installation for real local access and control.