Home Security Cameras?

Frenly-Skitzo

Hi,
I've recently experienced some thefts from my yard. I'm thinking I should get security camera(s) to help discourage low-effort thieves.

Basically, I'm renting a crappy apartment and hope to leave soon. So I'm looking for a camera that is fairly small, cheap, easy to use, and can be quickly installed without needing to drill tons of holes and run a ton of cable. Then can be removed and taken with me in a couple of months.

One of the main problem I have is I don't really know what is good or how to evaluate the privacy claims made by manufactures. My goal is to have something that I can easily host locally and won't stream my home to some cloud or be used to train AI, etc... I found the Reolink Altas PT Ultra, for example, that supposedly can operate on LAN and run on solar power. But the problem I have with many of these cameras is they require using kinda questionable apps and I don't really know what kind of tracking takes place via the apps.

I was thinking about just buying a camera and seeing if I can put up with whatever trade-offs there may be, but figured I should ask here first. Because I'm sure many of you are much further along than me in terms of understanding what good options there are for home security.

r134a

I had this same issue similar years ago, for another purpose (baby). I'll tell u my setup, perhaps it can help u in any way.

I've bought e cheap tp link camera which supports rtsp (unsafe protocal as far as i remember). There are other protocols that are preferred security wise, but i'm to lazy to research it now.

I've made a separate VLAN specific for that camera. I'm selfhosting shinobi aswell on my proxmox host. The camera is streaming over rtsp to the shinobi host.

I've disabled internet acces on the VLAN of the camera, and fully isolated that VLAN. With firewall rules i only allow streaming video over rtsp to the shinobi host. The shinobi host is also disallowed to acces the internet, only when updating the host i temporarely allow it internet acces. The shinobi host is also fully isolated, accesible behind a reverse proxy only from my fixed local lan ip of phone and pc and tv (to use it as a babyphone).

If u would want your setup accesible outside of your local lan, u can use tailscale and add your tailscale ip to allow acces your reverse proxy.

TrustExecutor

If you are into self hosting solutions. I suggest you look into Frigate. Put the cameras on a separate VLAN with no connectivity to other than the Frigate instance. Use a managed PoE switch to segment the network. You can use different detectors and models for machine learning. Superb software.