Hey guys,
I’ve absolutely had it with my Ring camera and doorbell, ive started using a network wide VPN and they are just too unreliable and expensive to continue - let alone actively blocking IPs from VPNs which I didnt know about and think is ridiculous.
I have looked in to Reolink cameras because I’ve seen someone talking about them before on lemmy, question is:
Have any of you used Reolink cameras and NVR in your setup and how well does it integrate / whats your opinion on the cameras themselves?
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I’m on year 5 with 6 of them and they’re all fine.
RTSP stream to frigate, and then frigate does the magic AI and recording shit.
They’re also not allowed outside the LAN and don’t seem to care about not being all internet connect-y, though YMMV on newer models.
I can’t think of a single case of being annoyed with them other than the mounting pressure is a little wonky and a sufficiently fat corvid can land on them and change the angle on one of the ones in the backyard but I’m not sure I’d blame the camera manufacturer because of a fat crow.
a fat crow
Similar story here. Again, no way do these things get to the internet. I use Zoneminder. Reasonable price and a decent image - night and day. Rock solid stability - I’ve never rebooted one to solve an issue. Their up times match firmware updates.
I use them, and I love them.
They’re banned from the internet, and never complain.
I use both SD cards inside the cameras, and dumps over SFTP.The general standard of integration with HASS is very good (IR control, alerts, streams, etc.)
If you want to access streams over a VPN, make sure that you configure the IP addresses manually in the app, rather than letting it auto-find (took me a while to work this out).Doorbell cam: Lovely bit of kit. Button press and person detection hooks in nicely with HASS things.
I really like being able to answer delivery people (and be silly with visitors). 2-way audio works well in the app, I keep meaning to try integrating it with HASS now the latest version has capability baked in.810A: Decent picture quality, the only fly in the ointment is that it uses H265 for full res, and a lot of open source things don’t officially support it.
510: Good value, and decent quality image. There is a firmware floating around that adds pet detection features too.
I’ve had two wireless solar cameras for a few years now, and a doorbell one for a year. The main reason I picked Reolink was because it wasn’t tied to a cloud or account, it’s just on the local network for me to use as I want. Pros are that they are still working, both cameras and solar panels. It doesn’t take much to keep them charged up. They can’t compare to a wired higher resolution, but I wasn’t going to try and do all that for just monitoring an area. I did end up getting a repeater for the network as sometimes the connection would be bad or drop since they are near the edge of the network router range, and that seemed to help. The doorbell is much more reliable and fast, being wired.
Cons - they’re wireless, so there is lag both in logging on and in framerate. I moved one of them from one place to another and had to find a spot for the solar, discovering that during fall when the sun dropped but before the leaves fall there was a shadow, so I had to maintain the charge manually for a few week, which wasn’t a big deal with a battery bank. Only other complaint might be that the detection software isn’t perfect, especially for animals. We’ve set up a Blink camera (previously used inside a birdhouse) to watch some stray cats that the one Reolink kept totally missing even though it’s right in view.
But overall I think they’re quality, and I imagine based on the doorbell one that the higher end wired ones are probably pretty good.
