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Posted: 7/2/2025 5:14:13 PM EDT
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I’ve scrolled though a lot of the pinned threads in here, and lord knows TGM went above and beyond doing all those writeups, but they’re a decade and a half old at this point. I currently have a blink system that is better than nothing but still sucks. It caught some asshole leaving the back of our driveway, behind the house, at 0230 this morning after he’d been checking door handles. It didn’t catch him walking up the driveway and it didn’t catch much of what he did while he was back there. It’s also WiFi and shitheads have flipperzeros and hackrfs now. What I am looking for is a PoE system for 5 or 6 exterior cameras that have really good person and vehicle detection to minimize false alerts (blink tells me every time my porch swing is blowing in the breeze but not that some asshole is trying to break into my car  ), an easy to use iOS app interface, and cloud storage so I’ll get alerts in realtime even when I’m not home. Ideally I’d do this for a few hundred bucks but I’d spend close to a grand for a really good system that does everything I want it to. What do I need? |
The hardest part about a zombie apocalypse will be pretending I'm not excited.
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Might I suggest Blue Iris with Reolink, HKVision or Dahua cameras and an old I5 8th Gen or newer PC. You should be able to get all of that for about a 1k and then scale it up as you want to add more. There is a great forum for Blue Iris and if you have any questions feel free to ask them on here. |
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Originally Posted By smoke14me: Might I suggest Blue Iris with Reolink, HKVision or Dahua cameras and an old I5 8th Gen or newer PC. You should be able to get all of that for about a 1k and then scale it up as you want to add more. There is a great forum for Blue Iris and if you have any questions feel free to ask them on here. Blue Iris looks good and seems to be very active improvements and added features. One thing to be aware of if even after purchase you only get same version upgrades. You need to subscribe to their annual maintenance plan to get major version upgrades. You can still run the version you have but to update you need their maintenance subsription. |
Tennessee Squire
| How DIY friendly is blue iris? I’ve got a high maintenance 4 month old, so even just running the Ethernet cables and mounting cameras is going to take an act of god to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t have time for a science project. |
The hardest part about a zombie apocalypse will be pretending I'm not excited.
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Originally Posted By thezentree: I’ve scrolled though a lot of the pinned threads in here, and lord knows TGM went above and beyond doing all those writeups, but they’re a decade and a half old at this point. I currently have a blink system that is better than nothing but still sucks. It caught some asshole leaving the back of our driveway, behind the house, at 0230 this morning after he’d been checking door handles. It didn’t catch him walking up the driveway and it didn’t catch much of what he did while he was back there. It’s also WiFi and shitheads have flipperzeros and hackrfs now. What I am looking for is a PoE system for 5 or 6 exterior cameras that have really good person and vehicle detection to minimize false alerts (blink tells me every time my porch swing is blowing in the breeze but not that some asshole is trying to break into my car ), an easy to use iOS app interface, and cloud storage so I’ll get alerts in realtime even when I’m not home. Ideally I’d do this for a few hundred bucks but I’d spend close to a grand for a really good system that does everything I want it to. What do I need? You rang? |
Everything you are doing is wrong, and it is my sworn duty to resist you.
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Originally Posted By thezentree: Hell yeah. What would you do with a clean slate? Honestly? Ubiquiti. I'm transitioning most of my camera systems over to them now. My wife and I own property/land in several very geographically-separated areas (we're talking >1000 miles), including some rental property. Some of it is off-grid, and remote enough that there is literally no internet access but Starlink (thank you, Elon Musk). I've found that Ubiquiti is some of the easiest-to-use surveillance hardware (with solid video quality) that you can get for the money. The included VPN also works over Starlink, which was critical in my selection process. Ubiquiti cameras used to be SERIOUSLY bad... I'm talking the worst of the cheapo plastic junk. You can look back through some of the old threads where I talk about them... but they're like a whole new company now. They have upped their game to the point that it's VERY good. In fact, I'd do it over the Hikvision stuff... and have. |
Everything you are doing is wrong, and it is my sworn duty to resist you.
Joined:
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VA, USA
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Originally Posted By smoke14me: Might I suggest Blue Iris with Reolink, HKVision or Dahua cameras and an old I5 8th Gen or newer PC. You should be able to get all of that for about a 1k and then scale it up as you want to add more. There is a great forum for Blue Iris and if you have any questions feel free to ask them on here. This guy knows what he’s talking about. Go with Dahua and BI. |
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Originally Posted By TheGrayMan: Honestly? Ubiquiti. I'm transitioning most of my camera systems over to them now. My wife and I own property/land in several very geographically-separated areas (we're talking >1000 miles), including some rental property. Some of it is off-grid, and remote enough that there is literally no internet access but Starlink (thank you, Elon Musk). I've found that Ubiquiti is some of the easiest-to-use surveillance hardware (with solid video quality) that you can get for the money. The included VPN also works over Starlink, which was critical in my selection process. Ubiquiti cameras used to be SERIOUSLY bad... I'm talking the worst of the cheapo plastic junk. You can look back through some of the old threads where I talk about them... but they're like a whole new company now. They have upped their game to the point that it's VERY good. In fact, I'd do it over the Hikvision stuff... and have. I had a home grown Reolink/Synology system for a few years and I always had difficulty with accessing it remotely (admittedly, it was probably something I did). Since I have a UniFi router, I figured I’d try their stuff out, one camera at a time. Now I’ve replaced all my Reolink cameras with UniFi Protect cameras. Easy to setup, good quality video, fast to access remotely. The only downside is they aren’t as inexpensive as the Reolink Cameras. |
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I've been shopping around for quite some time for a security camera system that I could install. I was looking at POE camera systems, but I've decided that I don't want to be crawling around in the attic and dealing with all the wires, camera mounting, and other issues. I found Camius wireless NVR systems that would work for me, but I can't find much reviews on the product or the company. I like the idea that Camius is not subscription based. I also looked a Lorex and Reolink. I might just bite the bullet and go with Camius. |
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Originally Posted By thezentree: How DIY friendly is blue iris? I’ve got a high maintenance 4 month old, so even just running the Ethernet cables and mounting cameras is going to take an act of god to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t have time for a science project. Blue iris is not too difficult if you have basic networking knowledge and can grow to as large or complex as most would ever want. However, like others have mentioned Ubiquiti equipment is pretty good but will require you to run their cameras and is generally more expensive to build a larger system. I have experiencing installing and running both along with several of the shelf camera systems and prefer Blue Iris. If you are just going for easiest to throw something up and don’t have the time then the Reolink systems on Amazon are decent. |
Joined:
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USA
| I'm putting together a frankensystem that consists of a power-efficient Minisforum mini-pc board coupled with anHBA controller in a NAS case running ProxMox with TrueNAS and NVR inside, a decommissioned datacenter PoE switch with Dahua PoE cameras plugged into it. But I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea. |
| Thanks all. Sounds like Reolink is probably the best choice for me given my situation. We’ll probably start looking for our forever home sometime in the next few years and I will look into Blue Iris (or whatever is the cats ass then) but for now Reolink sounds like a good compromise between ease of install/use/performance. |
The hardest part about a zombie apocalypse will be pretending I'm not excited.
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Originally Posted By smoke14me: Blue iris is not too difficult if you have basic networking knowledge and can grow to as large or complex as most would ever want. However, like others have mentioned Ubiquiti equipment is pretty good but will require you to run their cameras and is generally more expensive to build a larger system. I have experiencing installing and running both along with several of the shelf camera systems and prefer Blue Iris. If you are just going for easiest to throw something up and don’t have the time then the Reolink systems on Amazon are decent. It's my understanding that Unifi/Ubiquiti no longer requires the use of their cameras. Other cameras may be installed and are supported. Look into it for yourself. I still use the Unifi cameras exclusively. |
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Originally Posted By Stan_TheGunNut: It's my understanding that Unifi/Ubiquiti no longer requires the use of their cameras. Other cameras may be installed and are supported. Look into it for yourself. I still use the Unifi cameras exclusively. This is accurate. The Unifi Protect application has a setting that allows it to detect third-party cameras. If they support ONVIF, the Unifi system will talk to them. |
Everything you are doing is wrong, and it is my sworn duty to resist you.
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Currently have a reolink/blue iris system. Going to move to a complete ubiquity/unifi protect system and ditch the previous. Frustrated by blue iris - can’t control the reolink ir lights/lights, false positives, piss poor detections half the time, Slow to start/access remotely - the turning piint was two parts: Literally had a bull moose walk right through my detection zones, as defined, in broad daylight and nothing. After i moved to a unifi network,i caught the the reolink cameras dialing out, with alarming regularity to external IP’s. |
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