Comment on Cams, anyone?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.
I recently added two reolink cameras to my setup. Out of the box, they would not let me assign them IPs, they did not even try to get an IP from my network. They needed to be connected to via the mobile app the first time, then reconfigured for IP. Wasn’t a great user experience even if the cameras are now fine.
Onboarding a networked device should not require a mobile app, fill stop.
But you still kept the cameras and didn’t return them… Where’s the full stop? lol
Well I certainly won’t be buying anymore, and I’ll be letting anyone who asks know about my shitty experience, but yeah, you’re right. Partial stop.
How would you connect them to your network? They have no inputs.
Well shit I wish someone would have told me that before I directly connected them to my switch via Ethernet.
They’re PoE, rlc-520a. They absolutely have inputs.
Oh ok. I was thinking wifi. Yeah, that’s strange that they won’t work with direct ethernet.
I had 2 of these for years ran back to Synology surveillance station and they were great. I’ve expanded to 6 cameras now and bought the Reolink NVR. It works great, with good picture quality. Pretty inexpensive setup overall. No downtime. Very happy with Reolink.
Reolink camera
Nice, had heard the name, but looking at their site, didn’t realize they had so many options, and no cloud requirement! Awesome, looking like the likely option, thanks!
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Be careful with reolink, their P2P solution is pretty suspicious. No body really knows how it works and who it shares the data with.
You can disable those features, but it will stop reolink app from working. For the app to work, it needs to push this information to their cloud storage.
Better to selfhost frigate and just rtsp cameras there.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I would assume it’s based on TURN, since you don’t need to log in.
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
The problem is that it can only be speculated how they work, because they have not published it. That is quite suspicious in my book.
I personally would avoid reolink and use rtsp + frigate + ha, to have full control with known open source selfhosting solution.
I understand that people like the easy setup, but if you already do selfhosting, it isn’t that big jump.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Sure, but I’ve tried Frigate, and it’s not even close to Reolink in terms of ease of use. It was a giant pain in the ass to get it working to detect people in the camera. And even then, getting a push notification is something I couldn’t even figure out. And using it on a phone is really bad UX.