My girlfriend is be very interested in putting Blink (Amazon) cameras up around our property. I am not interested in paying Amazon to keep our security footage.
What I’d like to do is have motion activated internet connected cameras around the property that somehow send footage to a server (I don’t know if that’s the correct term, I’m kind of an idiot) that I keep on the property.
So I have three questions:
- is this the right forum to be asking about self hosting security footage?
- does anyone here have experience doing this and would they be willing to send some pointers my way?
- is this a feasible DIY project or am I better served paying for a service?
I’ve done a little digging into self hosting and it’s not cheap, but I think it will be cheaper than paying a subscription. And safer too, which is rad.
Thank you all!
Dahua/Loryta + Frigate + Home assistant
You can do object detection and recording with Frigate. Notifications and actions on events with Home Assistant.
You can use just about any camera with Frigate in general, but I prefer Dahua because that’s what’s tested by the frigate team… and the new PTZ features work great with the Dahua cameras. So a camera can watch a normal area… and if it detects a person (or whatever object you set) will lock onto that person and follow them around until it can’t any longer then return to the original “normal” position. It’s great.
The downfall is that this requires a lot of initial configuration effort on your end, but the software is all free, with no requirements to pay for anything at all outside of the hardware. Something else to keep in mind is that if you’re self-hosting… and the device you host on is stolen, the footage goes with it. There’s lots of little boxes on amazon that run Frigate really well. Anything with an N100 for instance will run many streams just fine (I have 3 cameras setup on the little guy for my grandfather to keep an eye on him, using about 1/8th the total resources, so could probably handle up to 10-12 cameras quite easily.)