I "solved" this by working for the company that provides the cameras and platform, which means I know exactly who has access to my data, and where it's going. It's possibly not the most viable option, but it does give me about as much confidence in the solution as I'm ever going to get.
Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
31–40 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#32Just recently I build a surveillance cam for my baby girl - I documented the approach in a blog post here: https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/
It does not rely on any external cloud service or the like, but is based on a Raspberry PI and a IR cam, completely self-hosted. The stream is only available in the local network, but could be accessed from anywhere with a properly set up VPN (e.g. Wireguard).
It does not tick all your requirements but maybe you can use it as a foundation for building your own solution.
Also have a look at ZoneMinder: https://www.zoneminder.com/
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#33I use the Ubiquiti USG and Cloud key with their outdoor cameras. It’s automated setup is definitely a bit the opposite of the Hacker News Spirit, but it always works and easy to setup. Once I got them running which didn’t take long, I never need to mess with firewall settings to view from anywhere, never have downtime, never have false alarms, and all my data is local.
I also have some Schlage locks and a few sensors on areas like my garage doors in case they are forcibly opened.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you only have one camera you could be okay, running two 720 mjpeg streams over usb2 can be quite problematic ;)
Do you know what codec and resolution is in use? What about the lag? What model of camera?
I'm curious because my CCTV journey has been over a few years, and there has obviously been kernel and distro improvements.
I did use the MotionEyeOS distro with an internal camera last summer briefly (a fortnight), but it didn't fit my use case very well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think I'm better off not knowing who comes when I'm away.
If they have any business with me, they know my phone number or email address, or they can write a letter.
Otherwise, I'd rather not worry about the mysterious strangers. 99.99999% of them will be delivering pizza leaflets anyway.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#36An 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 curious, where is that?
Poland resident here. Everyone locks the door here, even in the most remote areas.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#37Why would you want home surveillance in the first place? Not having any cameras at all is probably safer in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#38I don't. I don't install surveillance in my apartment. Before going for it, consider carefully whether you really need it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#39Synology NAS with surveillance station. You can flash the firmware on the $25 Wyze cams and connect them via RTSP. Only catch is that SS allows 2 cams for free and then a $50 license per cam after. We only plan to have 2 and already had the NAS so all in all an easy enough project.
The Wyze cams are nice as they have audio, detection zones, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you do home surveillance?
#40Lots of suggestions for ZoneMinder already; I haven't used either, but https://shinobi.video/ is the other bookmark I have from looking into it a while ago.
I tried out Shinobi but found it to be very unstable. The video feeds from my cameras would just break without any indication of why.
I was running Motion on the same machine and it continued to work without any problems.