That's a nice idea, but Blue Iris in particular, while being affordable and while not requiring a subscription, only runs on Windows. Keeping a Windows system running 24/7 is a whole chore in itself.
Got any suggestions for OSes that are easy to secure and easy to run 24/7?
MotionEyeOS isn’t as easy as a Windows installer and is probably only as secure as you make the rest of your network, but as a main Windows user and occasional *nix, the various guides weren’t too hard to follow and it’s been fairly reliable.
I rolled my own system, initially with MotionEye, and then rolled over to Frigate. I appreciate the extra object detection feature in MotionEye, whereas MotionEye really only records on, well, motion. Even with two 720P streams, I'm able to do motion detection and object recognition on an ancient Core2Duo Mac Mini, no TPU.
No data leaves my LAN unless I want it to.
The most painful part of the whole process was the YAML files for Frigate.
Got any suggestions for OSes that are easy to secure and easy to run 24/7?