Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?

In this age of IoT where devices are being taken over by strangers and (service) companies are storing clear-text passwords, how do you manage your home security? I'm talking less about motion sensors and door/window open/close sensors, and more about video surveillance. I want to add a couple of IP cameras but I'm completely petrified by the thought of someone getting access to a live feed from my house, due to the negligence of the service provider.

I've looked around and there are plenty of options for IP/Wi-Fi cameras with a tone of cool features, which can be accessed through a smartphone app, which, of course, is handled by the manufacturer (feed goes through its servers).

What I'd like is an IP camera that provides an API to which I can connect from my home server and let me see the feed only trough it. Motion sensing is also a cool, and useful feature, as it would allow me to send notifications.

How would you solve this or better yet, did you have this issue and already solved it?

When I first brought my puppy home I set up a Raspberry Pi with a Camera module to spy on him during the day. I had it stream to a private YouTube channel, but there's no reason it couldn't stream to anywhere you like.

You could also use the IR camera and a good enough IR lamp to give you coverage at night as well. Use a PIR if you want motion sensing added on.

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-bird-b...

That's an excellent question. I personally want something simpler - 4-8 CCTV cameras on a drive that gets automatically backed up to a remote server of my choosing. I suppose the only thing stopping me from doing it in Linux is getting CCTV output to the drive.

I changed my view a bit and basically turn it off when I'm not away. (I work at home, but if you don't you could always schedule it to turn on/off every day) When I do go for longer holidays, I accept that the service can be hacked and someone could get access to the feed (although I think it's not very likely). There's just not much risk in it for me. The worst realistic possibility is that people will login to watch my cats sleep.

As for home surveillance, I have the following 2 setups: Linux box with zoneminder, which offers motion detect, history, alerts via email, FTP upload, USB and network cameras. And the cameras which aren't supported, they have a FTP client with motion detection, to that linux box, and the uploaded videos from the cameras, I convert them from avi to mp4 and use rclone to copy the resulting videos on my nextcloud server, so that, I can access videos from both zoneminder and FTP on my phone, as well, having a backup elsewhere.