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What I find a bit of a shame is how dependent on the cloud it is. I live in a country where the internet isn't reliable, fast or secure so any cloud services ar

What I find a bit of a shame is how dependent on the cloud it is. I live in a country where the internet isn't reliable, fast or secure so any cloud services are a barely worth the hassle or simply no-go if the government blocks them. I know that small US startups won't spend resources making their service work in "backward" markets like mine. I'm hoping to find a local set of applications that can just store video on a computer hidden in a closet with internet notifications being optional rather than essential. The basic idea sounds great - nearly everyone has an old smartphone, maybe with a bad battery that can still work fine powered by USB.

soylentcola 11y ago
https://www.ispyconnect.com/ https://www.ispyconnect.com/ I've used this with cheap ($100-150) IP cameras and I believe there are mobile applications that can make a smartphone act as an IP camera as well, although I'd imagine they may not always be ideal since they're not meant to be running/recording like that all the time. Still, I've done exactly what you describe before getting a NAS with surveillance/IPCam monitoring software. Run iSpy on an old computer in a closet, set it up so the recordings go in your Drive/Dropbox/etc. folder and set the max archive size depending on your available storage or how much you want to eat up. That way your stuff if stored locally and you can still access recent recordings elsewhere via your online storage. You can skip the online storage part if you want, or I believe there is a "pro" service with iSpy that gives online options but I never used them. On its own, it's a great bit of software and once you tweak the settings a bit (recording quality/format, motion detection sensitivity, etc) it's pretty flexible and you should be able to get it working reasonably well on even older hardware. I've run it on old Core2Duo laptops as well as my more modern desktop. Encoding lots of streams can get demanding on the old gear but for a cam or two it's not too bad.

soylentcola 11y ago

https://www.ispyconnect.com/ https://www.ispyconnect.com/ I've used this with cheap ($100-150) IP cameras and I believe there are mobile applications that can make a smartphone act as an IP camera as well, although I'd imagine they may not always be ideal since they're not meant to be running/recording like that all the time. Still, I've done exactly what you describe before getting a NAS with surveillance/IPCam monitoring software. Run iSpy on an old computer in a closet, set it up so the recordings go in your Drive/Dropbox/etc. folder and set the max archive size depending on your available storage or how much you want to eat up. That way your stuff if stored locally and you can still access recent recordings elsewhere via your online storage. You can skip the online storage part if you want, or I believe there is a "pro" service with iSpy that gives online options but I never used them. On its own, it's a great bit of software and once you tweak the settings a bit (recording quality/format, motion detection sensitivity, etc) it's pretty flexible and you should be able to get it working reasonably well on even older hardware. I've run it on old Core2Duo laptops as well as my more modern desktop. Encoding lots of streams can get demanding on the old gear but for a cam or two it's not too bad.