What drew me to them is that they have RTSP (and ONVIF for their PTZ models) built in, so you're not beholden to their app. I use them paired with Frigate, but they also all include an SD card slot for local recording.
They have on-camera detection for people, pets, cars, etc. No obligation to use their cloud services (I have them on an IoT VLAN with internet access disabled, and have never had an issue). If you're not using your own NVR then you'll probably have to keep them internet accessible for remote viewing.
Cameras have been in the Texas elements for a few years now and the streams look like they did brand new. I'd say my only complaint about them is that the mounts are oddly designed, but perfectly usable as is. 3D printing largely makes that a non-issue, though.
Frigate for video recording, even if you use none of the GPU based object detection features it does a fine job of recording and live view from a browser.
The machine running frigate may need to be some kind of private VPN client for remote access depending on how your ISP is setup.
Frigate will really work with a huge selection of random h264 rtsp stream cameras. You can use a mix of high end high quality expensive cameras and cheap ones to monitor less important spots.
Reolink doorbell camera will work natively in frigate with bidirectional audio via html5/webrtc in a browser to listen and talk to people.
I’m migrating from my zigbee stuff bridged through home assistant to HomeKit. Now I have thread to HomeKit directly
[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/myggspray-wireless-motion-senso...
I've never been able to get their general security cameras to work reliably. Between poor uptime, frequent need for power cycling, and inconsistent stream quality, I'd choose something else unless you already own them or their particular form factors suit your needs.
If anyone goes this route save yourself a ton of trouble and ignore 95% of the articles and forum posts telling you to use Scrypted and HomeBridge. It is trash and won’t work well.
The best way to link the NVR to the Internet and other smart devices is with HomeAssistant. Everything else is trash.
It actually works, and HomeAssistant exposed motion detection alerts as their own sensors. The vehicle alerts, people alerts, animal alerts, and more generic motion alerts all pipe in as if they are their own device. You can easily combine this with some super cheap smart light switches and a speaker or two to make your own alarm system. The NVR has EXCELLENT person, animal, and vehicle detection and differentiation. Very few false positives, and I have never seen them miss something even under the worst conditions. We had a thunderstorm last night and they picked up vehicles on the road through heavy rain and flashes of lightning.
Do not bother connecting the Reolink mobile app to the the Internet. It is perfectly serviceable for when you are on the same network, it’s just anywhere else. Just pipe video out with HomeAssistant.
walrus01•2h ago
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/collections/best-z-wave-sen...
Or just more basic human presence sensors
https://sonoff.tech/products/sonoff-zigbee-human-presence-se...
taylor-tg•1h ago
If one doesn't want to invest in Z-Wave I'd say grab some of the Aqara FP1/FP2 sensors. The FP2 gives you full room zone presence detection, so you can put it in your kitchen/dining room and set up predefined areas and it'll expose those as their own presence zones.
If you don't need that level of granularity, the generic Tuya mmWave sensors on Amazon, or elsewhere, are a solid option. Super discrete, plenty of tuning parameters, and good smart home platform integration. I prefer the ZigBee ones because the WiFi ones can be a little noisy on your LAN (traffic not interference).