How do you do home surveillance?

I started by using a NVR off AliExpress. It worked well until I added a camera from a different vendor, same brand though and it refused to be reliable and had frequent disconnections.

Moved onto ZoneMinder and after hours of setup I felt the UI wasn't good enough for a non-tech person. I want others in my family access the feeds with ease, ZoneMinder does not cut it.

While I was experimenting with cameras, I was also getting into HomeAssistant which had motionEye as a supported service. It was easy to add cameras and almost any camera could be hacked to have RTSP support and motionEye.

Motion-detection could be enabled on the Raspberry Pi's motionEye, offloading compute off the cameras. This was important for me as many of my cheap Chinese cameras lag/hang/shutdown on load.

The Raspberry Pi also has Pi-Hole installed which I configured to block all IPs and domains being used by the IP cameras thereby limiting its access to local network only.

As I kept adding cameras (10+), performance on Raspberry Pi started getting affected, so I added another Raspberry Pi and installed motionEye on it. Setup MQTT on motionEye to send notifications to HomeAssistant on motion/human detection. Added multiple HDDs (4) so cameras can write with less conflicts.

I still haven't got some cameras (Xiaomi) into this setup as I don't want to hack them yet. (The open firmware(s) lack features). But they do backup recordings to the same Raspberry Pi NFS and I plan to find something which can show motionEye and Xiaomi videos in one interface.

I use a homegrown solution consisting of Raspberry Pi Zero W's with cameras, using the motion (https://motion-project.github.io/) daemon, saving their captured video to a NFSv4 share on a server.

The shares on the server are grouped so that each individual camera has a subdirectory of a parent directory, which is in turn shared by Syncthing to another local mirror and a remote mirror.

A python script runs on the server, using Pyinotify to detect new files, and using TensorFlow to do basic object detection, and adds bounding boxes to videos where it detects humans.

Finally a notification is sent through Pushover via MQTT (Mosquitto) when a person is detected, along with an image and a camera name and timestamp. It does presence detection by pinging our phones, so notifications are only sent if nobody is home.

If i should do it all again i would probably just buy a couple of Unifi cameras and a Cloudkey Gen 2 Plus and be done with it :)

I'd recommend installing your own router. Mine is from Ubiquiti and they start at $50 ish. Dedicate a network/port/vlan to untrusted devices, don't allow any incoming or outgoing to that network except for anything you explicitly want and set up.

Then buy whatever IP camera you like. I bought 4 of the Reolink cameras for $50 ish each. Rated for outdoor use, power over ethernet, motion detection (can edit the sensitive area if you like), can be streamed to any RTSP client (like say most security software), etc. Generally plays well with others and doesn't depend on a cloud for anything.

So cameras -> RTSP -> whatever software you want.

At my parents house I purchased a relatively cheap desktop with server hardware (PowerEdge T20). We planned viewing angles and doors/windows that he wanted monitored. We ran Ethernet cables and got a POE switch.

I tested out most of the non-commercial NVR software and landed on Blue Iris (the most recommended on ipcamtalk.com). Zoneminder and others were not as stable nor feature complete. My dad has the Blue Iris app on his phone so he can monitor remotely.

Blue Iris has motion detection and other common features.

Hikvision and Amcrest are often recommended for IP cameras.

ipcamtalk.com is an great resource for troubleshooting.

It's been a rock solid setup for 3+ years.

Edit: Price list - Blue Iris 5 (~$50) + Blue Iris App (~$10) - 4 Hikvision IP Cams off eBay ($280) - T20 Desktop Server ($330) - Desktop Server Upgrades (~$160) - Ethernet Cables ($50)

When I first brought my puppy home I set up a Raspberry Pi with a Camera module to spy on him during the day. I had it stream to a private YouTube channel, but there's no reason it couldn't stream to anywhere you like.

You could also use the IR camera and a good enough IR lamp to give you coverage at night as well. Use a PIR if you want motion sensing added on.

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/infrared-bird-b...

Why would you want home surveillance in the first place? Not having any cameras at all is probably safer in the first place.

An aside - I am lucky enough to live somewhere where no security is needed. I don't even have lockable doors or windows. I only mention this because it hasn't struck me for a long time how different life felt when I lived in a city (there've been a few - London, Glasgow, Sydney, Brisbane). Locking a door would seem really odd to me here.

I did though once set up a timelapse cam to try & trace where a bush rat was getting in the house.

MotionEye and docker.

I started off with a couple of Chinese WiFi cameras. I needed to hack a perl script to get at its stream; https://gist.github.com/opless/d1effc2eefdf2dfe3b1a6418979bc...

Now I use eBay'd Axis POE cameras dumping continuous video to a samba share, and motion eye to capture a frame every second and video when motion triggered.

All very overkill but worthwhile as it's caught vandals, bike thieves and trespassing landlords.

A pfsense router with haproxy sorts out the SSL website to the docker containers part.

I "solved" this by working for the company that provides the cameras and platform, which means I know exactly who has access to my data, and where it's going. It's possibly not the most viable option, but it does give me about as much confidence in the solution as I'm ever going to get.

No cameras indoors.

When I did have them (for monitoring a puppy) I put a camera on a physical switch so power could be completely cut when I was at home. For awhile I had this on a WiFi enabled switch, though I used a different switch brand than the camera to add layers that would need to be compromised.

Just recently I build a surveillance cam for my baby girl - I documented the approach in a blog post here: https://77zzcx7.de/blog/posts/babyphone/

It does not rely on any external cloud service or the like, but is based on a Raspberry PI and a IR cam, completely self-hosted. The stream is only available in the local network, but could be accessed from anywhere with a properly set up VPN (e.g. Wireguard).

It does not tick all your requirements but maybe you can use it as a foundation for building your own solution.

Also have a look at ZoneMinder: https://www.zoneminder.com/

I'm not sure what the point would be of cameras inside my house, or of being able to watch any part of my property remotely. If I'm home, I'm home. If I'm not, I'm not, and there's little I can do about anything.

We had some packages stolen, so I did put up a porch cam. It consists of:

    - An old laptop propped up vertically behind the front door
    - A USB web cam clipped to the door, looking out and down
    - sudo apt-get install mocam, and a little fiddling with config files

I get about 7 days of motion-triggered videos, which I can rsync over to my main laptop, but only if I'm on the home network. No clouds involved.

As for home surveillance, I have the following 2 setups: Linux box with zoneminder, which offers motion detect, history, alerts via email, FTP upload, USB and network cameras. And the cameras which aren't supported, they have a FTP client with motion detection, to that linux box, and the uploaded videos from the cameras, I convert them from avi to mp4 and use rclone to copy the resulting videos on my nextcloud server, so that, I can access videos from both zoneminder and FTP on my phone, as well, having a backup elsewhere.

I use Zoneminder. That has support for a lot of different cameras and then you only have to connect to the one frontend regardless of the cameras themselves. It takes a fair bit of tweaking but it has been around for a very long time. This:

https://wiki.zoneminder.com/index.php/Understanding_ZoneMind...?

gives some handy hints on zoning.

I used to use ZoneMinder, but found that it needed a lot of babysitting. Cameras which disconnected, usually due to wifi interference, sometimes wouldn’t start working again when they came back on the network. The version I was on also struggled with larger image sizes, though that’s most likely due to a lack of memory.

I’ve since switched to a dedicated machine running Blue Iris. It works a lot better for me than ZoneMinder did.

Network-wise, cameras get segregated onto their own VLAN and they aren’t allowed to initiate connections to anywhere. The Blue Iris machine is the only machine allowed to initiate connections into the camera VLAN.

I use Node-RED and PushOver to deliver motion detection notifications from the outdoor cameras. They get run through AWS Rekognition first to filter out things I’m not interested in (e.g., don’t tell me about neighbourhood cats at the door, but do tell me about humans at the door).

Remote access is via a VPN. Connect on demand makes remote access as seamless as local access.

Instead of trying to get a camera with the appropriate API and features, I recommend using “dumb” cameras and having all of the smarts on the NVR side. The big advantage of this is that you can upgrade the smarts of the system without replacing the cameras. Central management of alerts, recordings, etc is also very worthwhile.

I evaluated ZoneMinder, Shinobi and Xeoma, but in the end, I went with Digital Watchdog Spectrum IPVMS[0] running in a Docker container. Since I already have a Linux server doing other stuff (running Home Assistant, web server, etc.), I wanted a VMS that would run natively under Linux. DWS is a real, commercial-quality VMS solution (it can scale to hundreds of cameras, multiple/redundant servers, have users with different roles, etc...) so it's not free; you pay a one-time license per-camera and get lifetime updates. It has excellent, high-quality (read: usable by non-techie people) apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, as well as easy-to-use mobile apps[1]. Best of all, nothing is sent to the cloud! But I (and more importantly, other family members) can just open the app on their phone/Mac and easily look at live camera views, past events where "motion" was detected, etc. It also has an extensive REST API, and is not restricted to working with just a single brand of camera like a lot of NVR solutions. (Note that DW Spectrum is marketed outside the US as Nx Witness VMS by Network Optix.[2])

[0] https://digital-watchdog.com/spectrum-landingpage/

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dw-mobile-plus/id1454719539

[2] https://www.networkoptix.com/nx-witness/

I changed my view a bit and basically turn it off when I'm not away. (I work at home, but if you don't you could always schedule it to turn on/off every day) When I do go for longer holidays, I accept that the service can be hacked and someone could get access to the feed (although I think it's not very likely). There's just not much risk in it for me. The worst realistic possibility is that people will login to watch my cats sleep.

When we got a new puppy, I wasn't bothered about recording and I didn't want my video sitting on some dodgy 3rd party cloud, so I dug out some old half-broken iPhones, plugged them into permanent power and run https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/icam-webcam-video-streaming/id... on them.

Worked very well.

I started with a combination of Raspberry Pi + Pi camera running motion - and then moved towards Ubiquiti with their PoE cameras and their NVR software.

This was when their NVR software came as a Debian package, and was well supported. It meant I could run up syncthing against the local instance to (near) instantaneously share new videos across from my remote network, on a satellite connection, back to my home network.

Ubiquiti now appear to have abandoned support of the run-your-own NVR approach, and instead are pushing dedicated devices, which remove a lot of the flexibility to use them as you see fit. Their motion detection is also done within the NVR, not the camera module itself, so you need an NVR close to the camera(s).

I mention this as the price in Australia for the entry-level Unifi camera devices is about the same as a raspberry pi + camera + microSD card. Power consumption will be higher with the latter, but the tradeoff is that it's a proper GNU/Linux host, not just a blackbox appliance.

I don't. I don't install surveillance in my apartment. Before going for it, consider carefully whether you really need it.

Synology NAS with surveillance station. You can flash the firmware on the $25 Wyze cams and connect them via RTSP. Only catch is that SS allows 2 cams for free and then a $50 license per cam after. We only plan to have 2 and already had the NAS so all in all an easy enough project.

The Wyze cams are nice as they have audio, detection zones, etc.

There are currently quite a few IP cameras in the market that broadcast directly to a web interface where you can password protect.

The brand I got was VStar (https://www.vstarcam.com.sg), it allows broadcast, control as well as record to a MicroSD card simultaneously.

As long as you secure your own network and monitors the logs to make sure no one that is not supposed to is connecting to your network, it should be fine.

It also has access log to tell you who accessed using what credentials. I managed to write a script that automatically pulls the logs every second and if there's an unrecognized IP, it will send me a slack notification.

Get a top to bottom UniFi setup from Ubiquiti. The cameras have everything you need for motion detection and night vision. You can use your own NVR or a cloud key gen2.

Most Cameras support RTSP which will allow you to monitor their streams from 3rd party software.

Orchid VMS Core [0] on Ordoid HC1 [1], 2 PoE cameras - turn off all the camera-based doo-dads

I use NAT to expose my web interface, Orchid marks motion on the timeline like most good video servers, and Orchid uses ONVIF / RTSP so it can use any standard IP camera

[0] https://www.ipconfigure.com/products/orchid - free on Arm

[1] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/ - 8 core A15 / A7, 2G ram + SATA, GBE

Tried out Shinobi, Motion Eye, Zoneminder, and Blue Iris. Ended up using Zoneminder due to easy mobile usage (not Shinobi, or MotionEye on iOS) and being docker friendly (not Blue Iris).

Hardware: raspberry pi zero running gstreamer rtsp streams. Didn't want to deal with all the terrible cameras phoning some random server.

Mobile App: zmNinja. $5.00. Worth it in my opinion. Motion notifications, event montage review, live streams, everything I need. HomeAssistant assists in enabling motion detection recording when our phones are not detected at home.

IP cam behind a firewall where your (private) VPN is whitelisted should work.

https://zoneminder.com/ looks good too.

I use the Ubiquiti USG and Cloud key with their outdoor cameras. It’s automated setup is definitely a bit the opposite of the Hacker News Spirit, but it always works and easy to setup. Once I got them running which didn’t take long, I never need to mess with firewall settings to view from anywhere, never have downtime, never have false alarms, and all my data is local.

I also have some Schlage locks and a few sensors on areas like my garage doors in case they are forcibly opened.

I use a raspberry pi 3 and camera with motion. Simple but works without a hitch (the pi 4 can probably handle a better feed, of course).

I have a QNAP NAS device with a bunch of storage. PPoE gigabit switch. A few ReoLink hardwired cameras pointed at all the entrances to my house. My QNAP device has a free NVR app that detects the cameras on the network and saves the recordings to the NAS. It's pretty simple and I don't have to worry about shady cloud-based devices.

IP Cam with FTP capabilities, home NAS server (data storage for cam footage), with cloud backup. And of course, IP cam live streams to my phone. My approach is no different than cam + dvr + subscription. Instead I am solving it with cloud storage backup via my in-house nas.

Unifi cameras are pretty solid. Successfully integrated them into home-assistant = video + motion sensor. For nvr you're free to use any as unifi provides rtsp stream. I would recommend NX Witness or Unifi Protect (but they are working thru webrtc)

Lots of suggestions for ZoneMinder already; I haven't used either, but https://shinobi.video/ is the other bookmark I have from looking into it a while ago.

I use a RaspyZero with cam and a bit of Python and Bash. Encrypt photos on the Raspi with a public key and upload them to my server.

I lock my doors and when I hear something strange I look out the window?

guns and insurance riders. low tech but i sleep well at night

That's an excellent question. I personally want something simpler - 4-8 CCTV cameras on a drive that gets automatically backed up to a remote server of my choosing. I suppose the only thing stopping me from doing it in Linux is getting CCTV output to the drive.

I bought an Alexa.

I live in Germany so I don't need home surveillance. I never experienced a break-in while living in Europe.

Also me and my family members are socialists so I can trust them instead of having to monitor them.