Technology

I went with REOlink cameras, and they're great. Just don't get any of the ones that run off of battery, because you can't use another service to capture the video.

You can just add firewall rules in the router to block them from the internet.

I choose a Reolink camera. It works well with Surveillance Station on my Synology NAS, Home Assistant, the official Android client, and the official Mac client. I've never been able to get the official Windows client to work. It's failed to work on two different computers.
The camera runs off Power Over Ethernet, so it's just a single CAT6 cable and there are no batteries to manage.
The camera bounces your requests to stream through Reolink's servers by default, but you can disable that feature if you're only using the cameras locally.

I'll be curious to see if anyone recommends any offline solutions for that use case. I did a Swann system awhile back, and its proprietary software sucked.

I'm thinking of eventually converting to either doing another Synology NAS dedicated to its own cam functionality or adding cams to my Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. Those are both expensive, and out of these three, two of them only work with their own cameras, and their own cameras only work with their software (I think).

On the other hand, Arlo has been convenient and less expensive. It's internet-connected, but for exterior cams, I don't have any problem with that. I don't recall if they have a free plan, so the cost could eventually add up in the long run, but it would take 5 years of a $30 subscription to add up to about $2k.

My limited personal experience makes me think the service-based providers (Arlo, Nest, SimpliSafe) have the most incentive (recurring revenue) to make their products easy, and they should stay more fresh with improvements and fixes. On the other hand, each time I mess with the old closed Swann system, it feels harder to find compatible access. It has a web UI that's stuck on some old browser plugin that doesn't meet most browsers' security requirements, and I haven't found an app that works on my latest Android. They have no incentive to make that old hardware stay good, and every incentive to get me to buy another system.

So that's why I would only look for a mainstream, service-based system for a family member for whom I need it to "just work". I got my parents Arlo, and they send me wildlife clips once in a while. I also got them a Logitech Harmony back when those were cool, and they kept losing it and, somehow, the sub for their sound bar, reverting to the basic-assed TV speakers because for some reason the better sound system controlled seamlessly both via HDMI and with a universal remote was still too complicated. The more fiddly Swann cameras would have just been a dust heater if they didn't rip it out and toss it.

If you use something like Frigate for recording/monitoring, you can set up motion sensing (and now PTZ tracking, if you get cameras that support relative motion commands!) and do it completely local on a NUC. Add a Coral TPM card for extra image processing power. It’ll even highlight and categorize what object type it sees. Designed to integrate into HomeAssistant but I think you can run it independently if you don’t need all that.

Another vote for Reolink. I’ve used their network video recorder with power over ethernet cameras and they are reliable and work well. My biggest complaint was that the NVR had a really loud fan on it.

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