Does anyone have any suggestions?
Zoneminder can be a bit a of bear to deal with but I'll be forever grateful to it for helping me get my foot in the door seeing how I would not have bought a Reolink NVR without first proving how valuable a security camera system would be.
As with all my "Smart Home" stuff I want it all to run locally and I abhor smart wifi devices (Z-wave and Zigbee only). Zoneminder is ideal for this setup and the zmninja [1] desktop/mobile app is pretty decent as well. I run the desktop app 24/7 on a monitor above my main monitor and it's so nice to just glace up to see if there is a package, someone at the door, etc. I was never able to get ZM's detection working reliably enough (too many false positives) so I just record 24/7 and go back and check footage if needed (Older than 30 days or if the disk is low triggers a cleanup/delete).
Are you saying you are only OK with Z-wave and Zigbee?
It took me multiple days to figure out how to give another person in my house access to the doorbell camera because the UI isn’t great and in a constant state of flux. (https://community.ui.com/questions/Add-user-to-UniFi-Protect...)
Also, everything relies on enabling remote access to my UniFi router (a Dream Machine Pro) which I thought was something the on-premises UniFi stuff was supposed to help me get away from. Accounts have to be UniFi cloud accounts and not local ones. Protect is totally dependent on the UniFi cloud but they’re offloading the hardware costs onto you.
I would say that it's worth trying to see some test video on whatever you go for before purchasing. I tried out a Ring Indoor Cam which is supposedly 1080p but only 15fps - it suffered from quite bad motion blur if you walked through a room at a good pace, as well as being visibly much lower bitrate than the Hive 1080p so I returned it.
Their free tier limitations bothers me. You only get image snapshots of events triggered within the last 24 hours or something. It's essentially useless for trying to establish any information from checking your event replays.
For a while, the premium subscription had to be added per camera, which added up quickly. I think they've since changed this, because I had cancelled for a while then signed up again recently, and got premium tier for all of my cameras with one fee (can't remember how much).
Even still with the premium tier, I'm personally just really not a fan of their UI. Scrubbing through event replays is not easy to do. I've had cameras randomly disconnect for no apparent reason while others kept functioning on the same network just fine. I have one that is pointing out of a window, and it performs really poorly in low-light conditions against the reflection in the glass in whatever position I try. Granted, I also have a set of the outdoor specific ones, and they have performed really well with no downtime that I can recall, even in strong weather.
Just not worth the money IMO, wish I had went for something more open and hackable to my liking.
I wouldn’t go anything other than PoE these days. The benefits of single cable + the ability to run a ups so the cameras don’t go dark during power outages is a winning combo.
Camera's I use are all inexpensive sv3c camera's off Amazon and they have been great overall. The one exception is I do run a different brand of dome cameras. I run all the cameras on a separate lan that is isolated and can't communicate to anything but the blueiris box.
Blue Iris has a steep learning curve, but there's helpful YouTube videos. You can do anything with Blue Iris. The only bummer is that it requires Windows.
Also police love cameras as it makes charging/proving cases much simpler and in turn should help reduce criminals around.
https://ipcamtalk.com is the place to go for good info.
