Security Camera / Security System Thread - Wired or wireless? That is the question.

[Jump]

I have been using https://blueirissoftware.com/ for years and it mostly Just Werks.
Its much more flexable and customizable then any consomer cloud or (((subscription))) CCTV systems.

The cameras are all on their own switch that is on the same UPS as the PC running the software. Since the cameras are air gapped from the rest of my network I don't have to worry about the chinky firmware in them phoning home. The PC has 2 NIC's in it. One for the CCTV switch and the other for the internet.

I use Bitvise ssh client to set up a reverse ssh tunnel to a VPS with a static IP so the mobile apps can directly connect to my home server. This cuts through NAT can can deal with my failover to LTE if my hardwired internet is cut.
Blue Iris can also automatically can push the clips via FTP to an offsite server, and also supports emailing clips and alerts. So if they find your home server and smash it the clips will be safe, offsite.

Lately there has been projects interfacing AI and facial recogintion to Blue Iris but I don't know anything about this.

 

[DavidS877]

You can get an NVR with an external drive and have the cameras write to it instead of having SD cards.

And if you're paranoid you can do something like a Raspberry Pi or other small SBC and shove it in a wall with some storage and power it off POE. No one will ever* find it. Of course now that I've given away my hiding location, I guess I should move it to the attic. No, don't do the attic, it will melt up there.

* Except the feds, if they want your camera recordings you're just screwed.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

And if you're paranoid you can do something like a Raspberry Pi or other small SBC and shove it in a wall with some storage and power it off POE. No one will ever* find it. Of course now that I've given away my hiding location, I guess I should move it to the attic. No, don't do the attic, it will melt up there.

* Except the feds, if they want your camera recordings you're just screwed.

Could also rent hosting somewhere that doesn't give data out to feds and store your encrypted recordings off-site.

Of course it doesn't preclude the use of thermoelectric rectal cryptoanalyzer technology by the feds. As in applying a soldering iron to one's ass until they provide the recordings.

 

[lil sleepy]

Axis makes good shit with warranties and on-endpoint analytics and plugins that are pretty neat. No need to download bullshit proprietary video players either. All that being said get ready to spend over 400$ per camera.

As our african-american friendos would say, "Axis dat primo shit".

Could also rent hosting somewhere that doesn't give data out to feds and store your encrypted recordings off-site.

Of course it doesn't preclude the use of thermoelectric rectal cryptoanalyzer technology by the feds. As in applying a soldering iron to one's ass until they provide the recordings.

Definitely read the billing terms if you go 3rd party cloud storage. Video streams can get absolutely massive traffic-wise, and if you do truely retarded shit like record 4k mjpeg streams @ 30fps you might as well take out a second mortgage now.

 

[Rock Eater]

 

[Jotch]

Of course it doesn't preclude the use of thermoelectric rectal cryptoanalyzer technology by the feds. As in applying a soldering iron to one's ass until they provide the recordings.

A good philosophy to have is that you want to avoid "passive surveilance", not "active surveilance". If there is a task force with the resources to solder your ass, doing said thing, then you have fucked up.
The best bet then is to escape the general population's computer based surveilance.
This helps to avoid the case of being "too secure"/paranoid by stipulating that if they want your data they will need to really work for it, not have the computer do it for them alongside 10,000 other people.

 

[Nate Higgers]

I know most of you fuckers have money so just don’t be lazy: use a wired PoE camera setup and run the Cat5/6 cable plenum in your attic/soffit or run it in 3/4” EMT to bell boxes.

 

[DavidS877]

I know most of you fuckers have money so just don’t be lazy: use a wired PoE camera setup and run the Cat5/6 cable plenum in your attic/soffit or run it in 3/4” EMT to bell boxes.

I have money. I never use anything smaller than 1". Main runs are 1 1/2".
I even sprung for the pretty orange ENT for the attic and crawl space runs.

Ok, fine, the doorbell is 1/2" LFNC, it had to punch through a header so it had to be as small as possible.

 

[Nate Higgers]

I have money. I never use anything smaller than 1". Main runs are 1 1/2".
I even sprung for the pretty orange ENT for the attic and crawl space runs.

Ok, fine, the doorbell is 1/2" LFNC, it had to punch through a header so it had to be as small as possible.

1” for Cat5/6 is pretty standard for commercial in my area but 3/4” is passable if you have just one cable, in my experience with that gay wattstopper crap.

Speaking of fishing flex through header studs, magnetic locks for home security sounds like a tempting idea but I guess it’s also another point of failure if you lose power unless you have that circuit on UPS or some kind of battery backup. Never installed and terminated one before, just roughed in the pathway for them.

 

[DavidS877]

one cable,

Do people really do that? Even my eave mount boxes get 2 cables, even if I know they will only ever have one camera.

Which came in handy when I added a LoRAWAN hotspot on one box and a Purple air sensor on another.

 

[lil sleepy]

When I've done fiber runs I'll pull more strands than I need, but for a 30ft conduit pull through 1" just run the cable you need and be done with it. If you're having to keep rerunning cables you have bigger problems.

Residential maglocks would be hilarious until they fail secure.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Hello friends. I'm trying to figure out how to create the following setup.

1.) One (1) battery powered doorbell camera. (I'm not happy about this but there's nothing I can do about it.)
2.) Local network recording. To SMB, or some kind of RTSP > SMB setup, whatever. I don't care.
3.) Remote access. I can set up a VPN if necessary, just as long as there's some way to watch it live from offsite.
4.) Some kind of phone alerts for activity. Between certain hours is great, face recognition is even better but not strictly.
5.) No cloud, or at least can disable it. More open source is better.

I tend to think Eufy is the way to go for the camera, but all NVRs suuuuuuuuuuuck. Frigate seems the least awful, but it can't handle the intermittent connection that battery powered cameras have. Wat do?

 

[lil sleepy]

Hello friends. I'm trying to figure out how to create the following setup.

1.) One (1) battery powered doorbell camera. (I'm not happy about this but there's nothing I can do about it.)
2.) Local network recording. To SMB, or some kind of RTSP > SMB setup, whatever. I don't care.
3.) Remote access. I can set up a VPN if necessary, just as long as there's some way to watch it live from offsite.
4.) Some kind of phone alerts for activity. Between certain hours is great, face recognition is even better but not strictly.
5.) No cloud, or at least can disable it. More open source is better.

I tend to think Eufy is the way to go for the camera, but all NVRs suuuuuuuuuuuck. Frigate seems the least awful, but it can't handle the intermittent connection that battery powered cameras have. Wat do?

What's the budget? Do you already have some of this or is this start from scratch?

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

What's the budget? Do you already have some of this or is this start from scratch?

Budget is pretty much whatever, within reason. I don't have any security camera stuff yet. I can put together a Pi for an NVR or whatever else is needed for infrastructure. I have a good home networking setup, I've just been ridiculously frustrated by this one thing.

 

[The_Red_Man]

Didn't realize there was another thread so cross posting my recommendation.

Reolink may be chinkshit, but it's cheap and works well and lets you have the choice of cloud/hybrid/local storage only. It supports FTP, so I'd recommend having a separate file server for longer-term video archiving, only relying on the NVR for quick access to recent footage.

 

[Jump]

Hello friends. I'm trying to figure out how to create the following setup.

1.) One (1) battery powered doorbell camera. (I'm not happy about this but there's nothing I can do about it.)
2.) Local network recording. To SMB, or some kind of RTSP > SMB setup, whatever. I don't care.
3.) Remote access. I can set up a VPN if necessary, just as long as there's some way to watch it live from offsite.
4.) Some kind of phone alerts for activity. Between certain hours is great, face recognition is even better but not strictly.
5.) No cloud, or at least can disable it. More open source is better.

I tend to think Eufy is the way to go for the camera, but all NVRs suuuuuuuuuuuck. Frigate seems the least awful, but it can't handle the intermittent connection that battery powered cameras have. Wat do?

BI that I mentioned in my post ticks most of those. But its not open source. I don't code so I never gave a shit.
The phone app is ok and works fine with my reverse ssh tunnel on a VPS. It's just a simple TCP https connection back to your server so it should be easy to tunnel or vpn how ever you want. The app does notifications and supports the Aux IO stuff in BI so you can use it for turning on lights or controlling garage doors or what ever.

I don't know how well #1 is going to work. BI wants a constant steam for the motion detection and pre-recording (what was happening before the trigger) and thats going to eat batteries. Is there old doorbell wires there you could re-use for power?

 

[Sam Losco]

I work on security cameras systems professionally, but not as a contractor/integrator. I have experience with Axis, Panasonic, and Avigilon cameras mostly and a few smaller brands, and Genetec and Avigilon backends.

I use Amcrest PoE cameras at home because they are cheap and the image quality is pretty good. Their firmware sucks though and you can't even setup new users for ONVIF, only the built in admin account will work.
I've tried a number of different NVR programs for home and never fully liked any for various reasons. Blue Iris is a popular one that I used for a while but it's clunky. I'm currently using the free version of Milestone Xprotect and it's ok, the operator UI is fine, but the configuration program is shitty. I do continuous recording because I don't trust motion recording, especially at night, plus if something moves out of frame, I'd still like to be able to listen to the audio recording.

If you do insist on terminating your own, consider feed through connectors or ones with with load bars. Feed through may be less moisture tolerant, but you're going to give them a good soak in Corrosion-X anyway, right?

I would never recommand anyone use feed through connectors. They suck and they will fail. Here's a fairly recent one I replaced done by a contractor because it burned up.

That was connected to an outdoor camera pulling no more than 30 watts and it was connected up inside the camera body not exposed.

If you know what you're doing and practice a little, you should have no problem with regular connectors.
I never use the stripping blade on the crimpers either because it's far too easy to cut into the individual wire jacket especially when there are so many variations on CAT cables. I come from the world of aviation electronics where a nicked wire jacket is not acceptable.
My tools for crimping ethernet:
Jacket stripping:

Klein D244-5C flush cut wire dykes

Klein crimpers

I kind of want to get some new crimpers that can handle 10p10c connectors as well but have next to no actual need for that so haven't done it.

Multi piece connectors are gay too.

 

[DavidS877]

That was connected to an outdoor camera pulling no more than 30 watts and it was connected up inside the camera body not exposed.

I'd still guess moisture unless the camera was heated and 100% sealed.

I have one that looked like that after the bare cable end sat outside for a couple months but was still connected to the POE switch.

Did I mention a liberal soaking in the moisture/corrosion preventer of your choice?

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I don't know how well #1 is going to work. BI wants a constant steam for the motion detection and pre-recording (what was happening before the trigger) and thats going to eat batteries. Is there old doorbell wires there you could re-use for power?

This is really the problem. If it wasn't for the battery powered camera requirement, this would be borderline trivial. But this is for a bugpod, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

 

[Sam Losco]

I'd still guess moisture unless the camera was heated and 100% sealed.

It was an Avigilon camera and those do suck so possible, and the company that installed it fucks them up all the time so probable, but there were no signs of that. Nothing else corroded, not observed problems with moisture in the dome, etc. They do not have heaters. It was one of the multi lens models, can't remember if it was a 3 or 4 head. I think 24-26W without the IR ring, so using the 30W profile. The IR ring bumps them up to the 60W profile.

Did I mention a liberal soaking in the moisture/corrosion preventer of your choice?

Yes, but still don't use those.

Also, people, make sure the cable jacket is inserted into the connector enough to get crimped down. I've seen connectors not work fully just because that little bit of strain relief wasn't there and the wires were working loose in the contact crimp. Excessive packet drop is usually a cabling problem.