I tried wyze and find it silly how video clips are limited to 5 seconds unless you give them money every month. I want something where the footage is saved on a local sdcard/hdd without any cloud reliance.
Even better if I don’t have to be locked into using the manufacturer’s app, but I’m flexible on that.
This is very helpful information. Thank you. I’ll go with NVR/FrigateNVR in that case. Unfortunately, I need to stick with wireless cameras because there are next to no power sources available outside the building. Good to know my wyze cameras don’t have to be e-waste in the case of FrigateNVR.
If you get a PoE switch many cameras are designed to be run off of the power it can supply over an Ethernet cable. So you just have to run the Ethernet cable (pretty easy).
Also you can get splitters that will break that PoE cable into one Ethernet and a 12v barrel jack for cameras that are not designed to use PoE directly.
I can’t stress enough how much better a direct connection is than wifi, but understand that sometimes it is the only option.
Other benefits include simply unplugging the camera from the switch if it freezes up as this effectively switches it off (this can be done remotely if you have a managed switch.) and obviously higher quality, more stable streams.
Have a look through the frigate documentation before buying a device to run it. It needs some kind of gpu to process the frames for object identification. The most economical one in my opinion is a something intel 8th gen or higher like a hp elite desk mini pc that has a 2.5in sata slot with the igpu and ideally a proper spinning hdd for the recording as it is constantly being written to and an ssd will burn out faster.
Believe me I’d love PoE, but it really isn’t easy to run ethernet cable from the inside of the building to the outside. It’s a large building with 3 stories.
I second the wired camera recommendation, at least for a few critical cameras.
WiFi cameras are vulnerable to a de-auth attack. It’s fairly trivial now to make a device that will kick all WiFi devices off of a particular network. It’s not so bad if they record internally and are inaccessible. If they can be reached, once someone is inside, or if they don’t record, they can be bypassed completely, or stolen.
This does all depend on the level of protection required. Basically, are you worth the effort of targeting, or is it just to dissuade opportunistic attempts.
For wyze to work with frigate you will need the wyze docker bridge running. It’s a PITA to have them stable. Better option is to install Thingino on the wyze cams and then add them to Frigate with the rtsp feed
I don’t know what any of that means right now but I appreciate it and am sure it will make sense once I research this a bit.
No worries, there are many guides for everything.
wyze seems to have deleted the RTSP firmware from their site and said they have no plan to bring it back. I’ll be looking for other cameras.
Install Thingino on them. it’s really easy just place the file on the SD card and then hold the button on power up. Each cam is slightly different but super easy. Once Thingino is installed connect the cams and grab the rtsp link on the main page ofnthe web interface.