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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Local only doorbells (self.homeassistant)

submitted 1 year ago by dbrand666 to c/homeassistant

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To expand on a previous poster asking about local only devices in general...

Has anyone found a reliable local only doorbell? I've been meaning to replace my Ring doorbell ever since Amazon bought them. I finally bought a Reolink WiFi doorbell and it looks great and was really easy to set up without Internet or their app, BUT...

It doesn't work. Capture to FTP gives me nice clear images but the videos are corrupt, maybe truncated. I can't even open them with VLC.

I tried installing an SD card and then moving the SD card to my laptop. The videos on there play for a few seconds and then freeze.

Reolink support hasn't responded to any of my questions, which is another minus for them.

I did notice that the unit seems to run very hot. Did I just get a dud?

So are there any alternatives? Should I just try buying another of these? At least returns (Amazon, Walmart) are easy.

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[–] dbrand666 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe my use case is unusual. This is my only camera and I'd prefer avoiding an NVR setup - mostly because I don't love the idea of running a constant hi def video stream over WiFi.

The documentation for this camera made me think it would be able to detect motion and record a video of activity from a few seconds before the motion was detected until a few seconds after it ends and FTP it to a server of my choice. From what I can see, it can successfully do this for snapshots but not for videos.

Back to your question, I upgraded immediately to the latest firmware before doing anything - the Home Assistant addon told me to. I then tried going back one version to see if it was just a bug in the latest firmware.

As an aside, the HA integration seems to be working flawlessly. It would be pretty easy to have HA trigger a capture of the video stream but that wouldn't contain the pre-motion capture that the doorbell seems to have.

As luck would have it, I finally got a response from Reolink through Walmart in response to my opening a return ticket a few days ago. I'll give them a couple more days to troubleshoot and update here.