Question Any available cameras that save to machine on local machine?

[schwim]

Hello there, everyone!

My desire is this: a relatively inexpensive wifi camera that will save to a local machine on the network and an app of some sort that would allow viewing the videos on your handheld device or PC. I would be happy to pay a low-cost subscription to get it.

I am not looking for blink, ring or similar as they are cost prohibitive and move your clips to their servers just to deliver them back to you.

Any suggestions would be most welcome!

 

[kanewolf]

Hello there, everyone!

My desire is this: a relatively inexpensive wifi camera that will save to a local machine on the network and an app of some sort that would allow viewing the videos on your handheld device or PC. I would be happy to pay a low-cost subscription to get it.

I am not looking for blink, ring or similar as they are cost prohibitive and move your clips to their servers just to deliver them back to you.

Any suggestions would be most welcome!

Amcrest can save to a NAS. Indoor or outdoor rated? WIFI is a very poor choice if the camera is important.

 

[schwim]

Amcrest can save to a NAS. Indoor or outdoor rated? WIFI is a very poor choice if the camera is important.

Outdoor rated, sorry. WIFI is a necessity, sadly for many of the positions that I need the cameras at.

 

[faalin]

You can use BlueIris, set the camera up in the software and it will record everything to the local computer. It has options for continuous recording or record on motion.

Think its like 50-70$ for the software one time unless you want to keep updating it every year. I use it at work that records 12 cameras to a local computer, it does continuous and splits the recordings every 4 hours. I then wrote a script that runs every night that deletes any file in the folder that is older then 20 days



Another option would be Ubiquiti but i dont think they have wifi cameras. But i use them at home. It records to a local NVR that you can view from you computer of app on your phone.

 

[kanewolf]

Outdoor rated, sorry. WIFI is a necessity, sadly for many of the positions that I need the cameras at.

That means that you have power there? You could look into powerline network adapters.

 

[schwim]

You can use BlueIris, set the camera up in the software and it will record everything to the local computer. It has options for continuous recording or record on motion.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm having problems getting a handle around what Blue Iris actually is though. I have found 4 different sites selling "Pro", "Full" and "Complete" licenses for the software, the android app is developed by none of companies selling the licenses and has an under 3 star review.

Is there an official vendor site that offers the software, license and app or is it intended to seem like a man behind the curtain type application?

 

[bill001g]

Home - Blue Iris Software

Innovative Video Management Software (VMS) to record up to 64 cameras, both IP and analog. Keep an eye on your home, place of business & valuables.

blueirissoftware.com

This does the same function as the proprietary NVR boxes that some cameras have. It basically pulls the data from the camera.
There is a free trial so you can play with it and see if it is something you like. It is the cheapest full function software that is around. It has a lot of features other than simple recording.

Now if you want the camera to do all the work many cameras can save data to simple microsoft shares. So you can use pretty much any pc. It works ok if you have very simple needs and very few cameras. Cameras though are really stupid the do a very poor job of flagging motion.

Reolink seems to be a very popular camera. Most the other ones people liked like say hikvission are on a china ban list. You can still legally buy them but many buinesses now don't want to risk it so they are harder to get.

 

[faalin]

https://blueirissoftware.com/

I used Hikvission cameras at work, i did have a few Reolink cameras but they are harder to setup, but once you figure out the settings it not hard to setup multiple. Blue Iris does have a remote viewing but i have never set it up, i try to not open up ports on the firewall if i dont have to.