Hey all. I’m starting to plan out how to build a home camera system. For now I just want to use it to keep an eye on the dogs while I’m out of the house, so all of it indoors and with audio, but with plans to expand in the future. My one hard requirement is that the camera themselves are only communicating locally and the streams are accessible outside my network in a secure manner.

I already have a server running some docker containers, including a reverse proxy*, with a GPU (Arc B580) installed for other video streaming. I also got a Google Coral on its way for future camera detection funs. Would the B580 be able to cope with say 2-4 camera streams (of say 1080p quality) and streaming a 4k HDR movie? This support page says it might be possible, but could stretch the limits a bit.

My imagined setup is PoE IP cameras with RTSP streaming to my home server running Frigate (I’m open to suggestions) with some Home Assistant on the side.

For cameras I’ve seen Dahua and Hikvision recommended. Do they all have/is RTSP a common feature on IP cameras? As none of the cameras I’ve looked at on Dahua’s website has explicitly said they support it.

I’ve been thinking about installing a separate network card on the server as well just for the cameras. But this might be a bit over-kill, and might be enough to block them on the router? But I image I will need a special switch for PoE either way.

Outside of buying cameras, switch, and cables and then configuring it all, are there any big ticket items I’ve missed? Or is my set up kinda meek and a separate server for the video streams is recommended?

  • I know a reverse proxy isn’t typically as safe as a VPN tunnel, but it’s a balance with easy of use.
  • cmnyboEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    The GPU won’t have any issues encoding several video streams at the same time. That’s not really necessary though. The cameras will do the encoding for you. Just set the bitrate and framerate that you want on the camera and pass that through. Most cameras support two streams, the secondary stream is usually limited to SD though. All of my Hikvision cameras support RTSP. It’s mostly just the consumer grade crap that only works with the manufacturers cloud service so they can spy on you or restrict features whenever they want.

    Don’t make the mistake I did and buy any Hikivision stuff from Amazon. They are all grey market and the firmware can’t be updated. I tried to update one of mine and now the user interface is stuck in Chinese. You have to get them from an authorized distributor.