Wifi cameras/security systems?

[Martinjmpr]

Who here can help me out figuring a camera system for our suburban house? I'm looking at Ring and similar setups but don't know much about them.

Trying to do internet research but figure I'd see if anyone else had been down this road before I try to reinvent the wheel.

We moved from Englewood to the Columbine area in February, and while we're happy with our new home, it seems like there's more petty/property crime around here than the area we used to live in (off of Kalamath in old Englewood.)

All this culminated in yesterday (Sunday) when I went to fill my truck with gas and discovered afterwards that both my license plates were missing from my Pathfinder which I park in the driveway (no room in the garage, unfortunately!) Apparently there are a lot of little petty "opportunity" thefts like this around (close your garage doors!)

Anyway, I'm looking at adding up to 3 cameras (one on the front porch and two more to monitor the side/front of the house that are not easily visible from inside.) I understand that now all the signals can be sent via WiFi to either a home computer or to a web-based server that we can then watch from our phones with an app.

So I'm curious to know what others have done with this kind of technology.

[MrPrena]

I got arlo because Costco had it on sale.

Good: it picks up bugs and even a rabbit running. Sensitive. It is easy to use.
Bad:
Tons of false alarm, unless you make it cover smaller area.
Sensitive to sunlight and shadow.
Takes ~2 second after motion to record.

Some have arlo pro and they are happier than regular arlo.

[Fentonite]

I got arlo because Costco had it on sale.

Good: it picks up bugs and even a rabbit running. Sensitive. It is easy to use.
Bad:
Tons of false alarm, unless you make it cover smaller area.
Sensitive to sunlight and shadow.
Takes ~2 second after motion to record.

Some have arlo pro and they are happier than regular arlo.

I have Arlo too. Ok as a minimalistic approach, nice in that the triggered recordings are instantly on the cloud, but not nearly as reliable as a continuous recording would be. I've caught some surprisingly sketchy stuff on video around my house, but I may look into Hikvision or another option.

[NukeRJ]

My house is wired with hikvision. Takes a little more knowledge to set up but it records on a loop for 4 weeks and then also sends email notifications for motion marking the date and time. Also records audio. If you can set up a router you can set up a standard POE IP cam system.

[rondog]

Subscribing to this one.....

[TFOGGER]

Subscribed. Been lookin at options for outside the house, most all of the one I have looked at have some fatal flaw in either hardware or software.

[DenverGP]

i've got 3 of these cameras, they do a decent job:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01G1U4MVA

I'll post of up a pic from them tomorrow. Nice picture during the day, acceptable night-vision mode.

Connected to a POE switch, with iSpy software running on a 5 year old machine. The iSpy software is free, but they charge a subscription to get access to your video feed from the internet/mobile phone. The iSpy software is open source, and I've downloaded it and am replacing their subscription features with free ones.

[brutal]

Blue Iris software on your computer and pick your poison on IP cams running on batteries, or PoE cams, etc.

Hard to beat if you want to get "tweaky" with it. Remote view/control app for your smart phone, etc. Has all the bells and whistles.

My wife likes to put a yard banner/flag out front and I can tune that little spot out, set pixel size detection, web access, etc. Highly tunable but maybe not for the non technical.

I only started with old cell phones and a free IP WebCam app, but need to step up to some better cameras. The frame rate capturing from the phones is too jittery.

Sadly, it doesn't work with Ring (ring's limit) but there's a few other doorbell cams out there that work with it, I just haven't picked one myself.

There's other folks here that use it way more than I do, Maybe they'll chime in. There was another thread it was discussed in as well if you can find it.

[LX470]

Blue Iris software on your computer and pick your poison on IP cams running on batteries, or PoE cams, etc.

Hard to beat if you want to get "tweaky" with it. Remote view/control app for your smart phone, etc. Has all the bells and whistles.

My wife likes to put a yard banner/flag out front and I can tune that little spot out, set pixel size detection, web access, etc. Highly tunable but maybe not for the non technical.

I only started with old cell phones and a free IP WebCam app, but need to step up to some better cameras. The frame rate capturing from the phones is too jittery.

Sadly, it doesn't work with Ring (ring's limit) but there's a few other doorbell cams out there that work with it, I just haven't picked one myself.

There's other folks here that use it way more than I do, Maybe they'll chime in. There was another thread it was discussed in as well if you can find it.

Likewise with Blue Iris. Very flexible for your needs...mine is setup with 4 cameras with one partially capturing the garage door. It's nice to check to make sure it's down from their phone app. My cameras are all POE (power over ethernet--power comes from a switch the network cables plug into) and move the data back to a computer. User settings send you alerts from detected movement. It's all very configurable.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

[NukeRJ]

Blue Iris is the way to go if you have an extra pc. Plus you can also vnc in if your employer blocks typical hosting ports for security reasons. I use ddns.net as well for a free domain name. Just make sure you have your firewall set up properly.