Gonna throw in another Reolink recommendation. I use Blue Iris as my NVR and have both that and the Reolink integrations in Home Assistant for motion notifications and lighting control. The cameras are durable (even in my very cold temps like -30C) and have really good image quality. If you don't have an NVR or Home Assistant, the built-in motion detection and app is still pretty good and you can just pop an SD card in for recording.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Have two Reolink doorbells in cart, battery powered and wifi (not ideal, but easy), thinking I'll just add old HD to my router to use for recordings, and/or SD card.
If you have a powered doorbell, the Reolink cams can be powered by that too.
I have Amcrest PoE cameras hooked to an Amcrest NVR for 24/7 recording and also Frigate running separately tied to Home Assistant to record clips and send notifications when people are out front/back of my house. It all works really well thus far after about a year of use.
Nice, checked them out, look like really nice cams, leaning towards battery doorbells to not have to deal with any wiring. Would love to have PoE, but sounds like a lot of work!
It was definitely not fun stringing Cat6 through the attic, but knowing myself, I probably wouldn't have stayed on top of battery changes and I also wanted 24/7 recording since a battery powered camera can miss movement and start recording late or not at all. I also need a doorbell camera still but I've had trouble finding one that checks all the boxes.
I found out reolink cameras have an official integration partnership with home assistant. I just installed my front door camera.
I've been looking at Reolink for a doorbell. They have PoE on them which is a win for my needs.
Nice, use HA as well, leaning about 99% towards just getting a couple of their doorbell cams, one for each door, and calling it good.
Slightly off topic and something I read from somewhere else, but make sure whatever you use can write the date & time onto the camera images, otherwise it isn't usable for any police / insurance claims.
I'd guess all systems do this now, but just wanted it to be on your checklist of features.
If the camera doesn't do it, then the storage server must.
(And make sure the clock is sync'd to something 😉)
Noted, good point, thanks!
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Make sure any cameras you get are ONVIF compatible. That'll give you the widest usability.
And while it's great to be self-hosted, I've never found anything as good as BlueIris for camera software, even if it does cost $50/yr. I run it in a Dockurr/windows container, there's a few projects out there that make Dockur easier to set up.
I personally use Frigate, which is default free, but has a plus tier for $50 a year (has custom AI training/models instead of default’s standard model).
Personally has all the features I’d want, curious what BlueIris brings, I’ve heard a bit about it.
I'd have to look at Frigate again, but I've used BI for a few years now for myself and neighbors that I've installed livestock monitoring cameras for. The phone app is quite good, it does very reliable recognition via Deepstack, it's compatible with so many cameras it isn't funny, and the automations are very extensive. Setting up schedules is pretty intuitive.
The geofencing is terrible, but that's about my biggest complaint with it, besides having to install it on a Windows VM. I did have it working in Wine years ago, but it wasn't very stable.
BlueIris
Right on, never heard of it, will check it out for sure....thanks!
For non cloud cams, someone posted here a while back about thingno firmware, takes cheap cams off the cloud. Works great on a wyze cam and was a gamechanger for me. Sttrroonngglllyyy recommend
Can confirm. Been using Wyze cameras for several years.
I'm not using this particular firmware but I bought them specifically because I could flash them.
Despite the firmware giving control of outbound traffic, I suggest blocking them at the network level.
Mine run on an sd card and if someone removes the sd card and reboots it or the card gets corrupted, it would fall back to factory settings.
I have quite a few of these and they are using very, very cheap sd cards and while none have failed, they most certainly will eventually.
I had never heard of this so went looking. Super useful stuff here!
A link for anyone interested: https://thingino.com/
I see it supports many cameras, but you need to pull them apart and use a serial hookup to flash the firmware... but for the wyze cams and a few others you can flash them directly with an SD card.
I liked how cheap the wyze cams were but desperately wanted to get them offline. This was my silver bullet.
Holy sht. I know what im doing this weekend.
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Frigate + Reolink (or actually Frigate-approved cams)
My amcrest cameras have been good, but hikvision has been even better. They're sneaky though so make sure they're on an isolated vlan.
I have 3 imou dahua chinesium wifi cameras which are working nicely. They would be even better if I could get some cable to them. I think the most important aspect is the onvif protocol, then the encoding should be standard h264 no other bullshit, then cable if possible.
I love frigate so much!
That's what I like about the hiks I have. They are configurable from the web browser. Some of my amcrest I had to bang an API over curl to keep the time zone set
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Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.
Be careful with reolink, their P2P solution is pretty suspicious. No body really knows how it works and who it shares the data with.
You can disable those features, but it will stop reolink app from working.
They have never explained how the peer-2-peer network works, and it security and privacy is quite unknown.
Reolink is Chinese, which doesn't really help these concerns.
Better to selfhost frigate and just rtsp cameras there.
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I recently added two reolink cameras to my setup. Out of the box, they would not let me assign them IPs, they did not even try to get an IP from my network. They needed to be connected to via the mobile app the first time, then reconfigured for IP. Wasn't a great user experience even if the cameras are now fine.
Onboarding a networked device should not require a mobile app, fill stop.
But you still kept the cameras and didn't return them... Where's the full stop? lol
Well I certainly won't be buying anymore, and I'll be letting anyone who asks know about my shitty experience, but yeah, you're right. Partial stop.
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I had 2 of these for years ran back to Synology surveillance station and they were great. I've expanded to 6 cameras now and bought the Reolink NVR. It works great, with good picture quality. Pretty inexpensive setup overall. No downtime. Very happy with Reolink.
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This is maybe controversial, but I love the Ubiquiti security stuff. Cameras (interior and exterior) doorbells, etc, it's all great. Pricey, but you get what you pay for.
And the data can stay local or be accessible via their services.
I chose to go local only, grabbed their UNVR and populated it with 4x 2TB drives and it has enough space to handle 7 cameras HD history for about a month.
+1 for Ubiquiti. I've got a Dream Machine and 5 camera hooked up, it's great.
I've experimented with ubiquiti cameras and for the most part I find them very overpriced for their quality point. They're good cameras, but they're not ONVIF compatible so if you want to get into their (super overpriced and limited) ecosystem you won't be able to intermix other cameras easily.
A good example is their doorbell camera. It's just not good. And they don't have more than one model, so if you want a good one you're buying something else, that won't work in their software, so now you're using two systems to watch your cameras.
I'm glad they work for you, but I don't recommend getting into their camera ecosystem.
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For the cameras themselves, if you would be interested in DIY solutions and have some old spare Raspberry Pis around, you can turn them into streaming IP cameras and have some control over what camera specs and lenses you use. I can't tell you how they compare to purpose-built cameras though.
Have seen some camera projects with Pis that look fun, would def like to try some one day.
It sounds like a fun project but I dont know if I'd rely on it for security purposes. Plus with the cost of Pis now you might as well but a full fledged camera.
For sure, that would be something just for fun, not main usage.
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