Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I’ve tried a lot of self-hosted NVR solutions as well as Synology Surveillance Station and Unifi Protect.
Granted I only tried with third party cameras and never Unifi cameras, but I was not a big fan of Protect, even with latest updates. Performance was just so sluggish for live view to come up or even scrubbing the recording. Support for third party cameras is also extremely limited, only supporting ONVIF and ignoring any events camera provides.
Synology has been rock solid, but very $$$ for camera licenses.
Scrypted to get cameras into HKSV is pretty great. Frigate is awesome at “AI” detection and classification, but needs a GPU or TPU accelerator.
Most recently I decided to save myself some headaches and got Aqara G5 Pro cameras. Native HomeKit Secure Video, ability to save video to NAS just as video files for long term storage, free 24HR continuous recording to Aqara cloud, ONVIF and RTSP feeds so the cameras can integrate with Protect or any other NVR.
I will admit I gave Protect an unfair advantage as it’s the only fully first party solution I tried (unless you count Apple HomeKit Secure Video?)
Protect with 3rd party cameras is indeed lacking. But it works like magic with first party cameras.
The only other solution I’ve tried was QNAP QVR Pro with third party cameras and it was awful
Sounds like you’re having better luck with HKSV than I did. For me that is where I started and quickly bailed on it despite the unlimited cloud storage. It just did a terrible job at recording video. It would always end the recording with the detected subject still in the frame. It was incredibly frustrating.
HKSV has been decent, but the protocol relies on cameras doing motion detection and telling HKSV when events happen that need to be recorded. So it works pretty good with good cameras.
That said it still only records clips of events. With Aqara G5 Pro I tell the cameras to also write video to NAS so that’s how I get continuous recording in addition to what HKSV offers
It’s been a year or two since I was looking into it and I didn’t have a NAS at the time, but another one of the issues I had was the tiny selection of cameras available. I tested some Aqara G2H Pros and the Logitech Circle View. The Aqaras I added local storage to and at least could get continuous recording, but event seeking is pretty terrible. The circle view was, despite very well built hardware, essentially useless. Keeping it connected to the network was basically impossible
I’m curious how writing to the NAS works. Is it just a bunch of files dumped to a network share or is there some sort of timeline viewing software available? Are they giant continuous files? Individual files for events? Without knowing the details it seems like it would be a nightmare to navigate and actually find useful information.
It’s a bunch of files dumped onto a network share. You can set it as continuous or as events. Either way it’s a bunch of smaller files in folders with dates