[veidr]

Absolutely! Wiring your house for video is awesome, for a huge array of potential reasons.

I bought a cloud-connected Nest camera to use as a baby monitor. Quickly realized how awesome it would be to have cameras in (almost) all rooms in my house, so I threw the Nest in the trash (terrible product) and got a few Amcrest cameras and hooked them up to a good, well-maintained Mac IP camera app called SecuritySpy[1].

It's great, and completely private, as it (obviously!) should be.

It's also way faster (obviously!) and lower latency when using it on the local network, than viewing video feeds routed through some advertising company's servers in the cloud, even on gigabit fiber.

I love it! Oh and the cameras were only $75 each.

[1]: http://www.bensoftware.com/securityspy/

[sharpercoder]

> how awesome it would be to have cameras in (almost) all rooms in my house

Why?

[Mister_Snuggles]

My original use-case for my cameras was to see what my cats are up to when I'm not home. I've since found many other uses for these cameras:

- Monitoring how much food and which food each cat consumes.

- Seeing who's at the front door when the doorbell rings.

- Peace of mind when I'm on vacation.

[heartbreak]

> I threw the Nest in the trash

I know this is an expression, but the idea of throwing out a $250 wireless camera seems excessive. Of course, adding a camera to every room in a house seems excessive too. I'm curious why you felt you needed cameras in every room? What's the "awesome" part?

[veidr]

Yeah, more precisely, I threw the Nest camera in the "junk box containing items I might end up trying to sell on e.g. craigslist if I ever find the time, which I probably actually won't, so the best outcome would likely be that one day somebody visiting would want the item and it could give it to them, or else it ends up in the literal trash some future day"...

But the Nest camera really is a terrible, awful product for many reasons (fundamentally flawed cloud-required design, additional horrid latency caused by software bugs, awful and dreadful user interface, etc). I hesitate to even give it to anybody.

However, trying it did make us realize we did want not just one camera, but a bunch. The cameras can send audio both directions, so they function as intercoms. Any computer, phone, tablet or TV that we have in the house can be used to check what's going on in another part of the house, and optionally talk to the people there.

Now when we have kids parties, we no longer have to send one adult upstairs with the kids to make sure they keep the nerf gun and plastic sword battles safe (for the kids, and for the house)--we can just relax in the living room and put the upstairs rooms on the TV.

Likewise, we can set the baby down in any room, and keep tabs on him while cooking or working or whatever.

The citizens of my little surveillance state also like the cameras -- the kids are used to them and use them ("mom! I want some water!") and my wife and I use them to keep tabs on each other, too. Am I at home? Oh yeah, there I am at my desk. So she never sends me messages like "Hey are you home? Is the baby awake?" any more.

The cameras also, of course, function as regular security cameras; capturing any action that occurs while we aren't there and storing the video remotely.

This was all fantastically easy to set up in 2017, too (compared to the security camera systems I set up at my businesses in decades past). The big issue is, of course, security in the other direction. But as long as you put the cameras themselves on a separate (preferably wired) network, and don't let them connect to the Internet (don't trust camera firmware!), it seems like it can be done reasonably securely.

I mean I might get hacked, sure. Maybe a zero-day comes out for my camera control software that exposes the video feeds over HTTPS, and an attacker can see inside my house and spy on me. That's not a good outcome, and I prefer to avoid that. But the cloud cameras from Nest, or Blink, etc. essentially come pre-hacked to share your video feeds with the large corporations that own them.

That's the part that seems crazy to me.