Unifi cameras are pretty solid.
Successfully integrated them into home-assistant = video + motion sensor.
For nvr you're free to use any as unifi provides rtsp stream.
I would recommend NX Witness or Unifi Protect (but they are working thru webrtc)
Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#22When 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-bi…
The "streaming to a private YouTube channel" is great outside the box thinking.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#23When 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-bi…
> I had it stream to a private YouTube channel
A private youtube channel is "private" to you and alphabet/youtube employees. I guess using your channel to check up on your puppy is fine, but you shouldn't expect privacy in your private channel.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#24Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#25There are currently quite a few IP cameras in the market that broadcast directly to a web interface where you can password protect. The brand I got was VStar ( https://www.vstarcam.com.sg ), it allows broadcast, control as well as record to a MicroSD card simultaneously. As long as you secure your own network and monitors the logs to make sure no one that is not supposed to is connecting to your network, it should be…
Searching for vstar security doesn't inspire much confidence.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#26I use a raspberry pi 3 and camera with motion. Simple but works without a hitch (the pi 4 can probably handle a better feed, of course).
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#27An aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door would seem really odd to me here. I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was get…
I am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have any keys.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#28No cameras indoors.
When I did have them (for monitoring a puppy) I put a camera on a physical switch so power could be completely cut when I was at home. For awhile I had this on a WiFi enabled switch, though I used a different switch brand than the camera to add layers that would need to be compromised.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#29MotionEye and docker. I started off with a couple of Chinese WiFi cameras. I needed to hack a perl script to get at its stream; https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc... Now I use eBay'd Axis POE cameras dumping continuous video to a samba share, and motion eye to capture a frame every second and video when motion triggered. All very overkill but worthwhile as it's caught vandals, bike thieves a…
The bad bits of my journey... Raspberry PIs, other SBCs and usb webcams/noIR are an exercise in futility, as the inbuilt camera interface and v4l lags horribly at reasonable resolutions. USB webcams can behave oddly if you stream constantly and are close to using the bandwidth of USB2 Zoneminder is memory hungry and will suck CPU like no tomorrow. But has a decent user interface, if you keep lots of data. MotionEye c…
I have no probs with a rpi and usb cam.
I use motion to only store movement.
And point the camera to the entry points to avoid privacy concerns.
Cheap and chearful. Bash scripts over ssh to turn it on or off.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#30An aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door would seem really odd to me here. I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was get…
I am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have any keys.
You are missing the point of surveillance, it's not always about bad things, and even if 99% of the time nothing happen where you live you my want to capture the some of the 1% moments. It's also useful if you want to know who came when you are not home or when you have delivery.