Hi everyone, I am new to this community but not to IP technology.. However I have been out of the loop for a few years and I know things have progressed without me haha!
I live in an apartment building, and ever since I moved in I've wanted to install SOME sort of camera to see who's at my door - since the design of the building requires that I either go downstairs and open the door to see (private entrances but no peephole) or go out on my deck and look over. There is no wired doorbell so the Ring cam is out. I had the idea of mounting a bullet cam to my deck railing, which would give a good view. Was originally looking at Alexa compatible cams since I have FireTVs in the living room and bedroom and it would be nice to just tell it to "show me the front door", but it seems they aren't ONVIF compatible and rely heavily on the cloud (not a fan of that, been burned by more than one service shutdown after buying dependent hardware).
So now I realize I shouldn't have procrastinated so long to get this done.. Last month my bicycle was stolen right off the porch, and two weeks ago my motorcycle was among several vehicles that were vandalized in the parking lot. I've also heard told that someone also attempted to break into one of the units in the next building. Now this is a nice place and we are all pretty pissed about the fact that not only did it happen, but nobody saw anything to report to the police. So now I am thinking of putting several cameras up on my deck that would be able to see my front door/porch, both ways down the alley (I am on the back side of the building), and at least part of the parking lot where I have my vehicles.
I have worked primarily with Hikvision cams in the past, but the whole recent phoning home to china and backdoor debacles put me off to installing them at my home. I understand that Dahua also had a couple vulnerabilities but from what I understand they have actually done something about it unlike government owned Hikvision.
I don't have a big budget, so I was considering 4x Dahua IPC-HFW1320S, with Blue Iris. Is this a decent cam for the money or would you recommend something different? I know to avoid -Z models because they are hacked firmware. I do not need wireless, and IR range isn't all that important because the parking lot and alley are decently lit. Because of where the building lighting and street lights are though, only the porch itself is in sort of a dark spot, but that camera would only be about 12 feet diagonally away from the door.
Now as far as the software side, I already have in service an actual server that I can install it on (dual Xeon e5450/64GB RAM/16TB RAID storage). For starting out I just want it to archive video (a few weeks to a month), but I would like to have it so that I can integrate it with my media system. I currently have FireTVs with Plex, but have used Kodi/XBMC in the past and am considering switching back, I know Kodi is a lot easier to make play nice with cams than Plex or FireTV are. Also have a few old Galaxy tablets laying around that would make good tabletop monitors. I know Blue Iris already has an app for mobile viewing, and I have unlimited data so that's one less thing I have to cobble together..
So what do you think?
Thanks!
Matt
I live in an apartment building, and ever since I moved in I've wanted to install SOME sort of camera to see who's at my door - since the design of the building requires that I either go downstairs and open the door to see (private entrances but no peephole) or go out on my deck and look over. There is no wired doorbell so the Ring cam is out. I had the idea of mounting a bullet cam to my deck railing, which would give a good view. Was originally looking at Alexa compatible cams since I have FireTVs in the living room and bedroom and it would be nice to just tell it to "show me the front door", but it seems they aren't ONVIF compatible and rely heavily on the cloud (not a fan of that, been burned by more than one service shutdown after buying dependent hardware).
So now I realize I shouldn't have procrastinated so long to get this done.. Last month my bicycle was stolen right off the porch, and two weeks ago my motorcycle was among several vehicles that were vandalized in the parking lot. I've also heard told that someone also attempted to break into one of the units in the next building. Now this is a nice place and we are all pretty pissed about the fact that not only did it happen, but nobody saw anything to report to the police. So now I am thinking of putting several cameras up on my deck that would be able to see my front door/porch, both ways down the alley (I am on the back side of the building), and at least part of the parking lot where I have my vehicles.
I have worked primarily with Hikvision cams in the past, but the whole recent phoning home to china and backdoor debacles put me off to installing them at my home. I understand that Dahua also had a couple vulnerabilities but from what I understand they have actually done something about it unlike government owned Hikvision.
I don't have a big budget, so I was considering 4x Dahua IPC-HFW1320S, with Blue Iris. Is this a decent cam for the money or would you recommend something different? I know to avoid -Z models because they are hacked firmware. I do not need wireless, and IR range isn't all that important because the parking lot and alley are decently lit. Because of where the building lighting and street lights are though, only the porch itself is in sort of a dark spot, but that camera would only be about 12 feet diagonally away from the door.
Now as far as the software side, I already have in service an actual server that I can install it on (dual Xeon e5450/64GB RAM/16TB RAID storage). For starting out I just want it to archive video (a few weeks to a month), but I would like to have it so that I can integrate it with my media system. I currently have FireTVs with Plex, but have used Kodi/XBMC in the past and am considering switching back, I know Kodi is a lot easier to make play nice with cams than Plex or FireTV are. Also have a few old Galaxy tablets laying around that would make good tabletop monitors. I know Blue Iris already has an app for mobile viewing, and I have unlimited data so that's one less thing I have to cobble together..
So what do you think?
Thanks!
Matt
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