[kwlug-disc] home security cameras

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

On Aug 4, 2022, at 11:58 AM, CrankyOldBugger <crankyoldbugger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Someone asked me about home security cameras, i.e. which ones to buy, how do they work, etc.
> 
> The obvious answer (I know very little about these) is the Google Nest cameras.  The person asking questions mentioned that Home Depot has a two-pack for $439.  But we all know the horror stories about Nest and Ring sharing the data with whoever asks them politely.
> 
> If I had an extra 50-100 hours in a day, I could probably hook up something with a Raspberry Pi, but I honestly don't have the time right now.  But at least that solution would be more secure.
> 
> Essentially, what they need is something to keep an eye on the front and back doors.  It's a fairly large house.  However, there is a home across the street for "special" people who have a bad habit of wandering where they shouldn't.  So there is a need for security here.

Late to the party, but I went a different route.

There are dozens of ONVIF/RTSP network cameras available from the usual vendors, with various qualities of image sensors, lenses, IP (water/dust ingress) rating, PTZ ability and PoE or wifi capability. They all work the same, and ONVIF is a pretty well-established protocol (and most will also support RTSP, which is what I use specifically). I’m using a half dozen outdoor rated 5MP h.264 PoE MarvioTech bullet cameras that are now 6 years old but still function as well as the day I installed them.

They all come in to my PoE switch which has them separated from the rest of the LAN and cut off from the WAN, but can talk to an old OSX laptop I have which is running SecuritySpy from BenSoftware. It’s the Mac equivalent of BlueIris for Windows. All the brains are in there; hardware h.264/265 decode, motion detection, continuous recording, emailing, phone app, etc., etc.. Works great for the most part, and even 2012-era Intel CPUs have multiple simultaneous h264/265 stream decode acceleration, which is why it’s running on an old MacBook Air and not my ancient first-gun i7, which lacks that acceleration and thus takes considerably more power to decode fewer streams.

I have also experimented with the OSS Viseron (https://github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) which runs on Linux and not only can take advantage of the usual GPU/CPU hardware acceleration for stream decoding, but can also use various NPU accelerators for object detection/classification. It ties in nicely with HomeAssistant as well. I really like it, but don’t use full time because I’m used to how SecuritySpy works.

I did look at various NVR boxes which could talk to the cameras but they all seem to come in two flavours: the first type are quite expensive and lack any real configuration or flexibility, and the other is far cheaper but relies on the cameras themselves to provide motion detection/alarming and that’s even less flexible. I also looked briefly at taking a small Zynq SoC or something similar and designing my own hardware with h264/265 decode, motion detection primitive, etc., but ain’t nobody got time for that, so a PC running “real” software it is.

My system isn’t tied to any one vendor of camera, and you can tweak/tune the performance/sensitivity any way you like. The only real downside I have run into with my approach is that it can't keep the damn spiders off the lenses. It’s my understanding that they’re attracted to the heat and IR, and if I had separate IR lights they’d probably build webs in front of them instead of the cameras. A combination of laziness and didn’t-think-of-installing-power/fixtures-for-IR-lights-ness keeps me from trying that. I have, however, tried mothballs, tung oil, and even cotton balls soaked in (organic) peppermint extract, stuffed into those plastic cat ball toys and hung like Truck Nutz under the cameras. None of those work, BTW, but I do get the curious delivery person or tradesman ask me why I have cat toys hanging from my cameras.

-A.

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