I’d like to set up three or four cameras on the exterior of my house, but I’m not sure where to start with this project. Ideally, these cameras would get power over Ethernet and record to a hard drive in my house that I could access remotely with a decent user interface. If the system could notify me when movement is detected that would be ideal as well. I don’t like the idea of using a Google, Amazon, or similar product because I don’t want to pay a subscription and I want to have control of the footage. What are you using that more or less accomplishes what I’ve described?
I love me some opensource applications, but nothing compares to Blue Iris in the software NVR space. It isn’t as much as a halfway decent camera, and if you don’t renew it after one year, you just lose access to updates, and you can catch up if you renew before that major version goes away. I run BI on a Dockur Windows container on a Linux server, and use Deepstack in another container to supply the AI object recognition to BI, it’s much lighter weight than the included Code Project AI they ship with it.
As for cameras, you want something that specifically says they’re ONVIF capable. Everything else will be some removedty chinese spyware you have to install. And get wired cameras that have 802.11af/at specced POE. There’s a lot of trash out there that says it’s POE and it’s some bastardized thing that’s not compatible with most POE switch voltages.