[drnick1]

> these days most of them are limited out-of-the-box in ways that are intended to drive you to paying a subscription service

This is why open protocols like RTSP are needed. A camera should never be allowed to communicate directly over the Internet.

[dspillett]

Many inexpensive cameras aimed at the consumer market have taken to "blocking" the open standards that they otherwise support. Not very well, stupid schemes like encryption the stream with a symmetric key that can be read off the device, but well enough to inconvenience the average home user such that they decide to go the convenience route and send the data to the cloud for AI training and Chinese/US/other government surveillance instead.

There are usually ways to get access to the standard protocols, unofficial firmwares for cameras by Yi¹ for instance, but many won't faf around like that even if they might try setup local recording (trying local software isn't going to break anything, an issue flashing a device could brick it so feels like a bigger step).

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[1] I used to have a couple of there cameras that did local recording to SD-card, to keep an eye on the cats remotely, though access to thar mysteriously stopped working and support just suggested using subscribing to cloud recording instead… Those cameras were dirt cheap though and after a little research I decided working out the right alt firmware for the units I had and using it, would be more faf than just buying new cameras that were less inconvenient and giving those away with appropriate "the only reliable way to use this device is to send you data overseas" warnings.