If you’re willing to buy into the brand a bit, Ubiquiti makes some decent cameras. PoE cameras are really great if you can run the ethernet but don’t have a power outlet around, and the wifi ones are great if you have the opposite.
The first thing you have to buy is a CloudKey or Dream Machine from them, and it stores all the video locally. You use their app to review footage and get alerts for motion/people/cars. If you allow it, it’ll connect with Ubiquiti and you can tunnel all your video watching and alerts through them. In theory they don’t record or capture anything, but if they were compromised they could. There is a direct connection option if you expose the CloudKey to the internet, which I think gets you all the same features but without Ubiquiti in the middle. You can weigh the risks of each (internet exposed device that could be hacked, vs Ubiquiti in the middle of your traffic). You could probably use VPN and “direct connection” without exposing anything if you want, I doubt alerts will work right though.
Once your storage device is setup, you just start plugging in cameras and away you go.
Their old software stack came with a version where you could host the server on a VM and store all your video on a NAS, but I don’t think they ever added that support back since the change a year or two ago. A lot of people were really cheesed about that.
If you’re willing to buy into the brand a bit, Ubiquiti makes some decent cameras. PoE cameras are really great if you can run the ethernet but don’t have a power outlet around, and the wifi ones are great if you have the opposite.
The first thing you have to buy is a CloudKey or Dream Machine from them, and it stores all the video locally. You use their app to review footage and get alerts for motion/people/cars. If you allow it, it’ll connect with Ubiquiti and you can tunnel all your video watching and alerts through them. In theory they don’t record or capture anything, but if they were compromised they could. There is a direct connection option if you expose the CloudKey to the internet, which I think gets you all the same features but without Ubiquiti in the middle. You can weigh the risks of each (internet exposed device that could be hacked, vs Ubiquiti in the middle of your traffic). You could probably use VPN and “direct connection” without exposing anything if you want, I doubt alerts will work right though.
Once your storage device is setup, you just start plugging in cameras and away you go.
Their old software stack came with a version where you could host the server on a VM and store all your video on a NAS, but I don’t think they ever added that support back since the change a year or two ago. A lot of people were really cheesed about that.