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I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning. Her
by kristopolous 8mo ago
I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning.
Here's what I found.
If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local.
Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones).
You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp"
Anyway, here's some wansview firmwared cameras
https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP $14
https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 $18
https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD $17
https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM $12.5
There's probably more
You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag.
If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good.
It's the only vendor I've found that does this.
This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do.
- mlrtime 8mo agoAre you saying they all come with the same firmware/software or they can be flashed to something else? It seems just as risky picking from a bunch of white labeled chinese knock-off type cameras, who knows whats running on them.
- nixpulvis 8mo agoAn external firewall with strict no WAN access would be smart regardless.
- kristopolous 8mo agoThey seem to come with the same capabilities. I assume they farm out the firmware to someone else that they license from, then they get the firmware at basically free in the hope that the firmware maker will push their cloud product but this is all speculation. These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras. They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles. If not I'll contact Wansview. In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them so who knows, maybe wansview is the win here. I'm totally open to nice things being cheap.
- Panda4 8mo agoI have been searching for the same thing and my search resulted to nothing. Thank you so much for providing this.