uber 1337 hax, wait what?

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Hey everyone,

Found this forum through google when trying to figure out what I want to do for my home as far as cameras go.

I recently wired my 1940 home with 24 cat 6 keystone jacks and all new RG6 coax cable into a Leviton 42" structured media enclosure in the office closet and paired it with a basic Netgear dumb switch and some soon to be installed Ubiquiti gear. I decided to finally take on this project after being fed up with spectrum constantly raising my cable prices, and their internet constantly dropping due to overloaded nodes (their words) plus at&t recently brought in gigabit fiber so why not?!

When I was researching and purchasing the Ubiquiti gear, I noticed their camera line and NVR so I figured instead of going full fanboy and impulse buying I'd do some actual research. From what I've found so far their cameras aren't the best of quality of bang for the buck.

I hope to find the information I'm looking for on here, but the basics of what I'm looking to find are cameras that aren't extremely expensive, weather rated, have PoE, a good web and mobile interface, and have good quality, including at night (something Ubiquiti seems to struggle with)
I will be installing a maximum of 10 cameras. I also hope to find some kind of software that will allow me to build my own NVR instead of purchasing one, unless that's truly the best option.

My experience with cameras goes as far as helping some friends and family Install and setup some Lorex PoE 4K packages they picked up.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, even if its just good keywords to use while searching i would greatly appreciate it.

-Parker
 

mat200

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Hey everyone,

Found this forum through google when trying to figure out what I want to do for my home as far as cameras go.

I recently wired my 1940 home with 24 cat 6 keystone jacks and all new RG6 coax cable into a Leviton 42" structured media enclosure in the office closet and paired it with a basic Netgear dumb switch and some soon to be installed Ubiquiti gear. I decided to finally take on this project after being fed up with spectrum constantly raising my cable prices, and their internet constantly dropping due to overloaded nodes (their words) plus at&t recently brought in gigabit fiber so why not?!

When I was researching and purchasing the Ubiquiti gear, I noticed their camera line and NVR so I figured instead of going full fanboy and impulse buying I'd do some actual research. From what I've found so far their cameras aren't the best of quality of bang for the buck.

I hope to find the information I'm looking for on here, but the basics of what I'm looking to find are cameras that aren't extremely expensive, weather rated, have PoE, a good web and mobile interface, and have good quality, including at night (something Ubiquiti seems to struggle with)
I will be installing a maximum of 10 cameras. I also hope to find some kind of software that will allow me to build my own NVR instead of purchasing one, unless that's truly the best option.

My experience with cameras goes as far as helping some friends and family Install and setup some Lorex PoE 4K packages they picked up.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, even if its just good keywords to use while searching i would greatly appreciate it.

-Parker
Welcome Parker @phenry370

We've got some good cliff notes to assist you as well as other notes in the wiki.

Do a search on "review" in titles ( see the search box in the upper right ) to see members reviews of different IP POE cameras.
 

aristobrat

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I've got a smart closet full of Unifi networking gear. Other than the PoE switch shutting off ports during bad thunderstorms (something none of my previous PoE switches ever did), I love their networking stuff. They recently swapped out my PoE switch, but I'll have to wait until next Spring to see how it does when it's stormy.

Almost all of my cameras are Dahua Starlights. Most are the 5231 varifocal turrets (which seems to be what the G3-Pro was designed after), but I've also got a 4231F-AS mini dome on the back porch, a SD1A203T-GN mini dome PTZ on the front porch, and a 5231-Z12 bullet camera zoomed in tight on the side of my house where the neighborhood teenagers sometimes like to test my cameras low-light motion abilities. For VMS, I use Blue Iris running on an old Alienware 3rd-gen i7 box that was laying around unused. I love BI's web interface (called UI3) and the BI iOS app for being able to quickly view what's going on live, or to quickly review alert clips to see if anything unusual happened. I also really like how easy it is to use the iOS app on my iPad to grab clips from multiple cameras and edit them into a video that's easy to share. I've had to do that first thing at work a few times when something weird happened over night.

I just ordered one of the new DH-IPC-HFW1831C-PIR to play around with. Curious to see how accurate alerts are with combination of the camera's motion detection plus the PIR. In really low-light areas, this camera won't perform as well as Starlights, but I think I have a spot that has enough ambient light for it to be useful. We'll see!
 
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