I want to see the wildlife in the garden at night, looking for some half decent cameras and maybe a NVR .... already made some bad choices.

[Gazz292]

Short version:
We want to record wildlife in the garden at night in the UK,
Currently got a reolink trackmix POE cam and a tapo C530WS wifi cam, want to add more POE cameras around the garden (fixed ones at low height, and PTZ ones at about 6 foot high (i live in a bungalow)) and i plan to add a NVR sometime.

A big 'need' is to be able to view the live feeds and recordings on a PC running windows 11 (something tapo can't do without using Home Assistant, and the tapo 530 does not play well with HA for me)
I've learnt to avoid tapo cams, and am figuring out that reolink stuff is not as good as the youtube 'reviewers' make out.

Looking for suggestions of fixed and PTZ IP cameras, plus an 8 to 16 channel NVR that works well with them,
Not got a very big budget, say £150 for each PTZ camera, and £100 for the fixed ones, and maybe £200 for a NVR (Can't really use blue iris or similar as a NVR, as we don't want a PC running 24/7)

We only plan to use the camera's to view wildlife, i live in a pretty safe, very quiet small village where nothing much ever happens, so will hopefully be recording only wildlife in the garden and not 'bad guys', but if i'm putting cams in the garden, i may as well put some out the front 'just incase'.




Long Version:
I'm in the uk and have been using some very cheap tapo wifi cameras for a couple of years to watch over my 3D printers, a pair of C60 fixed cams, and a C210 pan tilt cam.

Dad likes to put food out for the hedgehogs and wanted to watch what they get upto at night, so i put a 'spare' tapo C210 in the garden for a few nights when it was not raining, we also have mice we discovered, and this got us hooked,
So i made mistake number 1 and went and bought a tapo C530WS outdoor pan tilt cam,
We liked the idea of it being a 3K cam Vs the 2K of the C210's, the colour night vision, animal tracking and so on.
Of course things did not go well.

The tapo 530 cam does not play well with home assistant, most of the time the HD stream fails to load, the 'live view' low quality stream that does work in HA is terrible quality (both over wifi and via an ethernet cable),
viewing recordings from the cameras SD card via HA is a pain in the butt (it's not much better in the phone app TBH)
The biggest issue is the lack of a PC based viewer, tapo cameras seem to be aimed at people who are happy using their phone to view the camera, but dad does not have, or ever want a smartphone, he wants to view the wildlife on the big monitor on his PC... hence why i was trying to use HA.

So we decided to move away from tapo cameras for recording things, and i went and made mistake number 2 and ordered a reolink camera my fault for being swayed by all the youtube people who are claiming they are the mutts nuts i guess.

First i got an E1 outdoor pro, (4k, PTZ with 3x optical zoom etc), and promptly sent it back to amazon because it kept getting stuck on the rubber SD card bung when tilting, but the autofocus after zooming was so slow the hedgehogs had wandered out of shot by the time it had focused... that's when it didn't give up after spending 10 seconds trying and leave itself out of focus.
But it did give a damn good picture (both via wifi and ethernet cable) it auto tracked most animals well, and worked great with HA.... but dad prefered to use the reolink desktop app.

I'd decided to get a different camera to replace the E1, and went for a POE cam this time, with the plan to use a NVR at a later date and keep the camera traffic off the main home network (except when viewing the feeds and recordings that is)
We currently have a reolink trackmix POE camera watching the hedgehogs and mice (that we didn't know we had) running around the garden, but it is struggling to detect the hedgehogs, the tapo 530 actually detected them better!.


We really like that it auto zooms using the 2nd lens when it is following things... that's when it does detect an animal the size of a football and follow it that is,
As it using digital zoom on the 2nd lens there's none of the auto focus issues the E1 had, and it will auto zoom when tracking... but it's still a digital zoom at the end of the day, albeit on the 8mm lens (the 'wide angle' lens being the usual 2.8mm)



I get the feeling we could do better by changing to a better brand than reolink (or tapo), especially as i am thinking of adding a few more cameras around the garden and getting a NVR, i almost bought one of the reolink NVR's earlier, but found this forum when googling what hard drive i could use if i bought the reolink NVR that does not come with a HD (i have a couple of old DVR's from around 2010 in storage from when i last played with CCTV stuff, back then IP cam's were way out of my price range, so i had some 480p analog cams, took that lot down when i moved to a place that doesn't really need cctv as i don't have neighbours coming in the garden and stealing plants and anything i left out here)

The trackmix was bought from amazon for £130, so i can send it back if i can find a better cam and NVR solution.

 

[tigerwillow1]

You'll find that this forum very heavily leans toward Dahua cameras from Empire Tech. Among them, for your purposes, the short list of cameras is the 541 S3 and 581 S3 series, with Empire Tech's firmware version that allows the camera AI to detect animals. 541 will give you better low light sensitivity, and 581 will give finer resolution when there's a lot of light. With the exception of one PTZ model that's being currently tested, none of the other Dahua cameras will detect the presence of animals with their AI. All of them will detect animals with their stupid motion detection but you'd have a hard time finding them buried in a mountain of false triggers. You can view the cameras and recordings on a windows PC through the NVR's web interface, or the smartPSS Lite utility. If you're even slightly conflicted about 8-channel vs. 16-channel NVR, stop the agony of deciding and get the 16 channel version, which doesn't cost a whole lot more. I don't think you should summarily throw out BI. I'm conflicted over using it vs. an NVR. I don't want to go through the whole pro-and-con list, just summarizing that BI will cost you more time and effort to set up, but in return you get some much nicer viewing options and avoid a few maddening behaviors of the Dahua setup. But the elephant in the room might be that you can't get these cameras with your budget. I'm not familiar with UK prices. Converting UK pounds to dollars, you're about 50% too low, and I'm afraid that it could even be worse in the UK.

 

[TonyR]

I'm not advocating for anyone to use Tapo cameras over better quality Dahua and/or Hikvision cameras but just stating I have had very good results with the Tapo's RTSP video streams to Blue Iris VMS and VLC (but not Home Assistant). I have two Tapo C-210 cameras performing non-critcal duty watching pets in a sunroom and a car in a garage and they have performed very well for over 2 years now. Blue Iris VMS records their streams flawlessly with no hiccups as does VLC. As you know each camera can provide a higher resolution main stream and a lower resolution sub stream. Are you using the correct (main) stream URL with Home Assistant?

Here's the link on the TP-LINK Tapo site with the information on how to set up the correct streams => How to view Tapo camera on PC/NAS/NVR through RTSP/Onvif Protocol

 

[Gazz292]

Thankyou both for taking the time to read my wall of text and for the replies.

I guess camera's in the garden is like everything else in my life, what i want and what i can afford never seem to meet, so i will be stuck with using consumer camera's and wishing for pro cameras for a while it seems.

Yesterday i was ready to send the trackmix back for failing to detect the animals i wanted for the first night it was in use.
Now i am wondering if the AI recognition thing needs a while to 'learn' (it's the local on device Ai stuff, i don't want to use any cloud based services for anything relating to cameras or home automation stuff) as tonight it's been detecting even the smallest hedgehogs near the far end of it's view along the garden as 'pets' about 90% of the time, so it was then recording and tracking them with the 2nd lens (zooming in and using the pan/tilt as needed to keep up with them, tho it does lose the lock on them after a while)

The tapo camera is now triggering a lot more when the mice are near it, but that camera is hanging under a bench about a foot off the floor next to where we put food out for the hedgehogs.
I've recently found out the tapo cam has an Ai detection correction feature which it claims to help it 'learn' what i want it to detect better, so i've slowly been going through the recordings where it's triggered for general motion, and changing them to 'pet' when there was an animal in the recording.
Having to do this via the phone app is a pain tho (it's also physical pain for me for me due to arthritic fingers)



I just wish i could get the tapo's RTSP stream to show up in the reolink client but i don't think it's possible, some searches mention people saying they have done it with the older version of the reolink client software, so i downloaded V7 and tried it, but that one won't even connect to the trackmix cam let alone the tapo's stream.
And that doesn't get me the main thing i need anyway, which is to be able to view the recordings on the SD card of the tapo cam like i can with the reolink camera on a PC.



Re: the tapo streams to home assistant, i have tried all 3 streams i can get via the 'Tapo cameras' and 'TP_Link' integrations (the HD, SD and Live streams)
The HD main stream will show up for a few seconds after re-booting HA, then i lose it... i have logs for 'go2rtc' stream error's for that stream, so that's something i need to look at fixing,
The 'live' stream that comes from the TP_Link integration always works, and seems to be in-between the HD and SD streams somehow, even tho i know it only has a stream1 and stream2 coming from the camera.

But the main issue is having to sync the media from the tapo camera to HA with the tapo cameras integration to be able to playback recordings in HA, i'd need more storage on the Pi to do that than i currently have as it fills it up overnight, but i really want the HA server to just be there for live viewing of the 3D printer cams, and running my automation stuff rather than operating as an NVR.



I downloaded the trial of Blue Iris and got all 3 streams showing on that (the trackmix wide and zoom lens feeds, plus the tapo main feed), i can control the PTZ functions on both cams and stuff like that, but can't access any recordings on the camera's SD cards, but i get the feeling this is just not possible,
The tapo C530WS seems to be Onvif profile S, which is just the most basic functions i've read, and it would need to be profile G to allow playback (that's if i'm reading it right)

But this is all new stuff to me and i likely have things wrong.

 

[SIR VEYOR]

Since it’s for your father, maybe look at a PC stick that plugs into the HDMI of a TV?

Then he can maybe just press “source/input” and go from shows to cams live stream with one button. And bigger screen maybe.

And it’s small enough, that maybe a proficient UKer on here could set it up and ship you the cameras, maybe 1-2 Wifi routers, and PC stick already talking together. Put them on their own WiFi, they could be set as mesh or repeater and give good speed between them.