I thought the doorbell camera worked great with frigate, is that not the case? I don't have a need for cameras yet but that was on my shopping list...all cameras will be on a locked down vlan so it's fine if it TRIES to phone home if it still works "offline"
Are you running them with Frigate? I was thinking the lack of substream wouldn't be a problem because the frigate server could downscale if needed (but I haven't really looked into it yet)
Ahh gotcha, didn't consider that! I'll have to make sure my processor is up for the task. I think it will be...I'm doing 4 cameras + doorbell max and buying a NUC
Just make sure they have substreams and get a coral (or GPU) for detection. Then a pi could probably handle it.
I have enough processing to do it all on CPU (8 cams+doorbell) but it ramps up the power usage, so it was better to use the gpu I already had for transcoding, as detection.
Without you can still just record and overwrite. Not that it's extremely useful without detection and notifications.
I was planning on an Intel CPU that was recommended when I was putting my list together which I was told could handle detection up on to 8 cameras without issue (so I could skip the Coral all together)
I’ve owned a bunch of Foscam cameras, a sub-brand owned by Amcrest.
Amcrest and its Foscam sub-brand seem very interested in getting access to your cameras, have less capable and less convenient software, and the cameras themselves seem less well built than Reolink.
I bought a half a dozen V1 Wyze cams, and at least two of them have failed. I won’t touch that brand again. I also would never have used Wyze at all except for the exploit that allowed custom firmware installation for real local access and control.
I use Amcrest, mostly because the guy who makes frigate recommended them, and has affiliate links on his site. As a software developer myself, I have to say frigate (and HA) are two jewels of open source software and so I’m happy to support them however I can.
That being said, the cameras work well and are easy to integrate with both frigate and HA. They all try to phone home at first, but stop if you tell them to (I’ve confirmed this by monitoring the traffic on my dns servers).
I couldn’t find a privacy friendly wifi camera with a big enough battery to run continuously, so I ended up building my own with a solar panel, an inverter, and a 9ah lithium battery that sits on a fence post at the end of my driveway. It was a fun project, but I wish I could buy it.
Another small gripe is that the PTZ cameras from Amcrest all seem to be crazy expensive or have mixed reviews, so I’ve just held off on those for now.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll keep them on my list. I wasn't considering the PTZ cameras just the inexpensive turrets and plan on running them PoE so it looks like those issues won't affect me!