[noad]

I'm trying to think of any company I would trust for a camera in my house and am drawing a blank. Google is pure evil for sure, but which company is better?

It it even possible to roll your own LAN solution any more? The tech giants have become so hostile to anyone who dares to try to control their own data that I never even hear it discussed any more.

[joshvm]

You can build your own LAN system. You just need to plug a camera with a wide lens into a Pi, optionally with a PIR motion sensor. Possibly with some IR illumination for night vision.Have some code which motion triggers the camera (either in software or IR triggered) and upload the data to your own storage. That could be local on a NAS or cloud (a bucket you own).

I suggest this over an IP camera as you might as well be paranoid about those too. If you need live streaming that can be done with open source software fairly easily.

You would have to spend some time working on hardware, and it'd probably cost more, but technically it's just tedious rather than difficult. There are some projects to do this with the Pi camera already. You could even add object detection with ML quite easily, which is something you pay a lot for with other platforms.

What you miss out on is the level of embedded and mechanical integration that the commercial stuff has. Blink has a two year battery life (replaceable), the housings are IP rated etc.

[jdhawk]

Synology has a great product for running a whole fleet of self hosted cloud connected services, with decent apps, NAT Traversal, etc...

[giancarlostoro]

Wyze is the only company I trust currently. You dont have to use their app you can save it all to an SD card and there are github repos for custom firmware. I currently just use their software.

[criddell]

I would trust Apple more than Google because I think their incentives are better aligned with serving me.

[bradstewart]

I use Ubiquiti's Unifi cameras and NVR software. Works quite well, and is entirely LAN based.

[ocdtrekkie]

Most IP cameras support standard methods of accessing their video feeds. A program like iSpy will work fine, you just want to also have a firewall that will block your cameras' attempts to call home and not set up any cloud access.

[_coveredInBees]

Is that still true? I wanted to buy an IP camera to monitor our puppy's crate a few months back and I was shocked to find that pretty much all the cheapish IP cameras that used to support this a few years back have all moved to a cloud-only offering where you have to access your video via their app which streams your video to their cloud service (hard no).

I was amazed that not a single product in the sub $100 range on Amazon seemed to support direct LAN access. I ended up going with the Wyze cam, which still has that issue, but I'd trust a bit more over the no-name Chinese brands still running 10 year old Linux kernels on their cameras.

[ocdtrekkie]

I referred to iSpy both because it's a great free/open product, but it also has an excellent camera database with all of the video feed URLs for different model cameras. Check it out: https://www.ispyconnect.com/sources.aspx

From my experience, many cameras won't publicize/document this information, but it's still available/possible for almost every one.

[_coveredInBees]

Ah I see. Thanks for replying. It unfortunately looks like iSpy doesn't have a mobile client? Many years ago I used to use Robert Chou's "IP Cam Viewer" which was a no-nonsense app to connect to different IP cameras, but unfortunately that doesn't work with a lot of the changes that camera makers have made on their end to prevent direct IP connections.

[ocdtrekkie]

In my case, I'd strongly want to avoid direct IP connections to my cameras from a smartphone. That'd suggest very easy outside access to devices that have questionable security.

[_coveredInBees]

Ah, yeah for my use case it was purely for use within my LAN and camera firewalled externally.

[uptown]

It's very possible. Another alternative is to go with Apple HomeKit Secure Video products, which do send your data to the cloud, but in encrypted form which is only accessible to you.

[Mister_Snuggles]

You can use Blue Iris as an NVR plus any ONVIF compliant camera. This is what I do, with the cameras on their own VLAN so they can’t phone home.

It’s entirely possible to do what you want.