Reolink cameras look like they check all of your boxes. They can be self contained systems with a "recorder box" (actual term is NVR) that you keep on your property out of harms way or it can be a DIY PC with a program called Blue Iris. There is a variety of cameras to choose from with different features like Wifi, POE, PTZ, solar powered, etc. Spend as little or as much as you want. As you mentioned in your post, this will be pricey up front but will be cheaper in the long run.

I have been using Reolink RC-522s outside in the harsh Canadian cold winters. Even at -40 they kept working and their quality hasn't degraded.

I tried out q few options for NVR software, and I've settled on Frigate NVR, it was pretty painless to setup and "just worked".

Shinobi I found worked at first but three times it shit the bed, silently failed one day, and just stopped working. I'd wipe and re-install and it'd just fail after awhile. Frigate has never had this issue so far.

I use Power over Ethernet for the cameras, so i only had to run 1 single cable (ethernet) to each camera outside, no need to run high voltage which makes it way easier to install.

I use a small mini itx PC as the NVR with a 960ti installed in it for transcoding.

I have a fancy managed 48 port gigabit poe switch which is overkill for just cameras (I have tonnes of other PoE devices on my network as well justifying it), but any "dumb" gigabit poe switch will work for you, as long as you have enough ports for your cameras.

I personally use kubernetes for my machines running self hosted apps, but for most folks that's overkill abd you can just use docker compose!

Reolink or amcrest cameras paired with (software) frigate, blue iris, motioneye, shinobi, etc etc works fine.

A lot of the more modern NVR systems can be accessed from the internet. So you can use these.

Synology has security station on their NAS systems (although there is some licensing nowadays depending on model and number of cameras.

Ubiquity also offers local storage for their system, that also offers a bellcam (like ring) and different in and outdoor camera models.

Good luck!

Ubiquiti is good, if you have the money. I have an 8TB HDD in my UDM-PRO recording 24/7 the footage from 6 cameras. It isn’t a cheap solution but it works and it’s local.

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.)

Most cameras that can support RTSP streaming can be used for self-hosting, then you just need a good video recording / storage system. I used a mix of 3 different types of cameras, streaming RTSP to be recorded by Zoneminder.

You can research the different NVR / recording systems to find what suits you.

I use ubiquiti cameras and nvr for this purpose, might not be open source but I keep all the footage locally, it's easy to use and feature rich

On a related topic, Insecam is a website that shows live streams from insecure cameras. It's a great example on why privacy matters in every aspect of your life, even if you don't think it affects you personally.

Cameras in general aren't as easy as cheap plugs to deal with. There's the OpenIPC project but it seems only to support very specific chips that are sometimes older, hard to find or not price/feature competitive like something such as what TP-Link offers.

For what's worth TP-Link Tapo cameras (TC70, 71 etc.) aren't that bad when it comes to privacy, there isn't much "cloud". They do require you to use their mobile app and cloud to setup the camera but afterwards you can just run them on an isolated VLAN / firewall them from the internet completely and you'll still be able to use all of the camera's features. Those cameras provide a generic rtsp stream that even VLC can play and there's also a good HA integration that provides all features of the TP-Link Tapo application like pan / move / download recordings from the camera's SD card and whatnot 100% locally / offline.

I particularly like their cameras because they're really cheap and decent, while not perfect in terms of privacy they've a good trade off when it comes to price but require initial cloud setup. They also have wireless versions, ethernet versions and a cheap PoE splitter will be good for those.

My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the "system" can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.

For software I'd recommend using Frigate for ally the processing and then integrating it with Home Assistant.

Unfortunately, even if you're okay with accepting the sunk cost of purchasing a cloud camera with the foreknowledge that it might stop working in the future, there are still huge privacy and security concerns. Just recently, SwitchBot announced people were accidentally accessing each other's cameras. Whoops.

If you're looking for something that doesn't need the cloud to work, I would recommend IP cameras. That's the term you would look for. There's open source software to manage them too. Of course, you need to be decent at security yourself. Unfortunately. So perhaps those cloud companies still have a little bit of a leg up on the average person.

I'm using a bunch of wyze cam 3 cameras with the wzmini custom firmware installed and outside connections turned off. They took a while to figure out how to set up since I'd never had to deal with ssh keys before but after set up they are pretty bulletproof.

Esp-32(or some more appropriate esp) + RPI Camera + Home assistant/Openhab

You might want to look into Hivision cameras (or oem versions like Annke) and frigate NVR. All you need is a pc and some basic linux knowledge.

Synology has a whole ecosystem with the option to host the footage on their core NAS Products. It is pricey, thou.

I have thought about this from time to time. I want good surveillance, but I also don't want to lose control of the video.

I think that the solution that I favor right now is a Wyze cam V2 or similar flashed with openmiko. edit:(I had to buy wyze v2 cameras from the US on ebay to get v2 versions, user:@ashok36@[email protected] suggests in this comment to use v3 and Wyzemini firmware - this might do the job. clarification: the point is to replace the manufacturer's firmware which will phone home with something open source that you could audit)

These can be attached via USB or wifi interface to a server with zoneminder (https://zoneminder.com/) From there you could think about offsite records too and motion detection etc. [edit: wifi is useful as I don't want to rewire the house - though could be blocked (or the router could be unplugged!) if you are expecting technically savvy criminals. A solution here would be to use an old router on a separate wifi network, put somewhere where most of the property would have been traversed before it could be accessed (e.g. upstairs).]

Having said this, the setup is just fiddly enough that I keep to finding myself finding other stuff to do. [edit: 'Fiddly' is the wrong word, I think its pretty simple, I just find myself wanting more features until the project doesn't happen at all. I'd be clear that this is a feasible DIY project, so long as you accept that 'done' is better than 'perfect']

[edit: One last note - if you host the video yourself, you take responsibility for the security - this means keeping zoneminder and the OS up to date and offsite backups/networks/cameras secure. This is possibly something that a company is better at (but don't bet on it!). However, you are also a smaller attack target (because bad actors only get your video) so blackmailing you with whatever you do in your surveilled place is less valuable than having the same data for 1000s of people. Also, if someone has access to your home network - they can set up man-in-the-middle attacks and steal your bank details - you have to be doing something interesting in front of those cameras for it to be worth more than the contents of your bank account.]

edit:clarity/details

I've tried a few (MotionEye, Zomeminder, Shinobi) but after all that I have been loving Frigate

First of all, you can operate a fully FOSS firmware on your cameras: see OpenIPC (it needs some soldering tho). Second, you can try Frigate or ZoneMinder as NVR.

Going to bookmark some answers here.

Haven't read all. Look into home assistant and a camera that works with it (zigbee?)

https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted is a good forum

Yo I was just thinking about writing something like this. I want to use WebDAV as a backend, so you can just download whatever segment you want. And I think it would be possible to put videos of events in a different directory that it doesn’t purge.