4 ms·

I run video surveillance at my home out of some combination of paranoia and curiosity. But I run everything myself - cameras are recorded by an in-house NVR, wh

I run video surveillance at my home out of some combination of paranoia and curiosity. But I run everything myself - cameras are recorded by an in-house NVR, which is an inexpensive single-board computer with a 1TB hard disk, and 'alert' clips are uploaded to a VPS on the off chance of someone breaking in and stealing the NVR. Although open source NVR packages are, in my experience, a massive disaster (either extremely outdated and frustrating to set up and use in the case of ZoneMinder, or extremely feature limited as in the case of the fifty Raspberry Pi-based solutions), commercial software packages like Blue Iris and Xeoma (which is even cross-platform) are inexpensive and have expansive feature sets. I use Blue Iris, which has the downside of requiring Windows, but the upside of generating MQTT messages or HTTP requests on alerts which makes for a lot of easy integration. Xeoma is cross-platform but relatively immature (although I've found the vendor to be extremely responsive to emails) and has a bizarro-land UI that's very tricky to learn to use. On the other hand, consumers don't necessarily need to deal with any of this, because lots of vendors sell NVR appliances that are hardware and software in one product, and they're pretty cheap. Costco even regularly carries them from a couple of major manufacturers. I prefer to do things myself, but I've used appliance NVRs from Swann in a couple of cases and they work fine with extremely easy setup. More recently Ubiquiti has gotten into this space, and I haven't had the opportunity to try their system yet but their products tend to be pretty good quality and ease of use for the rock-bottom prices - and as I understand it their premises-based NVR also runs the UniFi manager, so it makes it really easy to build out a large-campus WiFi-based solution but might also be a neat trick for home use if you want to use the great-for-the-price Ubiquiti APs and/or USG. At the end of the day, I'm not convinced that cloud-based surveillance solutions really offer much to consumers beyond being backed by vendors with very aggressive marketing. Most people know about Ring cameras but don't know that they can buy a completely non-cloud, on-prem solution-in-a-box at the big box store or even, well, from Amazon. And at the end of the day, the manufacturers of these on-premises systems don't get to loop you into a "social network of fear" and analyze your video, so their opportunities to monetize are a lot more limited, and so they charge higher up-front prices. I think a lot of it is just awareness though - Amazon and their competition are pushing their cloud-based solutions very hard, while the on-prem surveillance vendors that have for the most part been around much longer just don't really advertise to the consumer market.

ErikAugust 7y ago
Do you have any hyperlinks to resources for those who want to go DIY-ish? Thanks in advance.
- bhauer 7y ago
  You can read about Ubiquiti's self-hosted gear at their web site, ui.com. A good starting point is their NVR/SDN controller, which they call a "CloudKey Gen2+" [1]. A slightly unfortunate name because using the word "Cloud" in the name makes it sound as if it's hosted in a third-party cloud when it's actually an on-prem device that can (optionally) be configured to allow remote access via the Ubiquiti cloud service. [1] https://unifi-protect.ui.com/cloud-key-gen2 https://unifi-protect.ui.com/cloud-key-gen2
- js2 7y ago
  Here's a review that covers a few of their cameras and both their older NVR software and newer Protect. I didn't write this, it's just a blog entry I came across while looking for a comparison of Unbt's video offerings. https://michaelkummer.com/tech/unifi-video-review/ https://michaelkummer.com/tech/unifi-video-review/
- jcrawfordor 7y ago
  I'm not sure if there's a good guide, maybe I ought to try to write one. I would say the simple things to keep in mind are just to buy cameras that are ONVIF compliant, since this more or less guarantees that you will be able to use them with any "open standard" NVR you want. tbh the ONVIF spec itself is frustrating and not that much help, it's just that ONVIF compliance guarantees you that there will be RTSP streams available and that an NVR will more-or-less be able to configure automatically. When it comes to NVRs, there's a million options and I couldn't produce reviews on all of them... but Blue Iris is probably the most popular commercial NVR and ZoneMinder and Shinobi the most popular open-source. I would describe ZoneMinder as hopelessly obsolete and Shinobi as unstable and hard to get running on other than their supported platforms, but Blue Iris is Windows only so everything has its problems. The only "big" NVR solution I've worked with is Milestone, and I'd say it's very good and actually not that expensive, but it is pretty heavy to deploy (e.g. needs MS SQL Server) and you have to buy through a VAR which is kind of a huge hassle to go through for a license that is only around $100 (for the lowest-end package). Also, if you run cheap no-brand Chinese made IP cameras like I do... the cameras are often pretty damn good very a very low price, but sometimes it's a real adventure figuring out how to configure them (e.g. firmware not completely translated to English, often shared between many models so half of the settings don't apply to your device) and I recommend blocking them off from the internet because some have management/cloud recording features that you can't disable and it's a little sketchy having them connect out to some white-box overseas cloud management solution all the time. It's a best practice to put IP cameras on their own VLAN anyway and it's not really that expensive to get home equipment that can support this, e.g. Ubiquiti's routers/switches and/or the TP-Link "Easy Smart" switches (which are 'semi-managed' and handle VLANs and QoS for well below the cost of a managed switch). But the machine I run Blue Iris on right now just happens to be a weird x86 single-board machine with 2 GbE interfaces, so I have the cameras on a physically segmented network just because it was easy.

ErikAugust 7y ago

Do you have any hyperlinks to resources for those who want to go DIY-ish? Thanks in advance.

bhauer 7y ago
You can read about Ubiquiti's self-hosted gear at their web site, ui.com. A good starting point is their NVR/SDN controller, which they call a "CloudKey Gen2+" [1]. A slightly unfortunate name because using the word "Cloud" in the name makes it sound as if it's hosted in a third-party cloud when it's actually an on-prem device that can (optionally) be configured to allow remote access via the Ubiquiti cloud service. [1] https://unifi-protect.ui.com/cloud-key-gen2 https://unifi-protect.ui.com/cloud-key-gen2
js2 7y ago
Here's a review that covers a few of their cameras and both their older NVR software and newer Protect. I didn't write this, it's just a blog entry I came across while looking for a comparison of Unbt's video offerings. https://michaelkummer.com/tech/unifi-video-review/ https://michaelkummer.com/tech/unifi-video-review/
jcrawfordor 7y ago
I'm not sure if there's a good guide, maybe I ought to try to write one. I would say the simple things to keep in mind are just to buy cameras that are ONVIF compliant, since this more or less guarantees that you will be able to use them with any "open standard" NVR you want. tbh the ONVIF spec itself is frustrating and not that much help, it's just that ONVIF compliance guarantees you that there will be RTSP streams available and that an NVR will more-or-less be able to configure automatically. When it comes to NVRs, there's a million options and I couldn't produce reviews on all of them... but Blue Iris is probably the most popular commercial NVR and ZoneMinder and Shinobi the most popular open-source. I would describe ZoneMinder as hopelessly obsolete and Shinobi as unstable and hard to get running on other than their supported platforms, but Blue Iris is Windows only so everything has its problems. The only "big" NVR solution I've worked with is Milestone, and I'd say it's very good and actually not that expensive, but it is pretty heavy to deploy (e.g. needs MS SQL Server) and you have to buy through a VAR which is kind of a huge hassle to go through for a license that is only around $100 (for the lowest-end package). Also, if you run cheap no-brand Chinese made IP cameras like I do... the cameras are often pretty damn good very a very low price, but sometimes it's a real adventure figuring out how to configure them (e.g. firmware not completely translated to English, often shared between many models so half of the settings don't apply to your device) and I recommend blocking them off from the internet because some have management/cloud recording features that you can't disable and it's a little sketchy having them connect out to some white-box overseas cloud management solution all the time. It's a best practice to put IP cameras on their own VLAN anyway and it's not really that expensive to get home equipment that can support this, e.g. Ubiquiti's routers/switches and/or the TP-Link "Easy Smart" switches (which are 'semi-managed' and handle VLANs and QoS for well below the cost of a managed switch). But the machine I run Blue Iris on right now just happens to be a weird x86 single-board machine with 2 GbE interfaces, so I have the cameras on a physically segmented network just because it was easy.