Hey guys,

I’ve absolutely had it with my Ring camera and doorbell, ive started using a network wide VPN and they are just too unreliable and expensive to continue - let alone actively blocking IPs from VPNs which I didnt know about and think is ridiculous.

I have looked in to Reolink cameras because I’ve seen someone talking about them before on lemmy, question is:

Have any of you used Reolink cameras and NVR in your setup and how well does it integrate / whats your opinion on the cameras themselves?

  • solofroto@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    I have three Reolink RLC-520A cameras. I tried integrating them with Frigate and ZoneMinder. Just way too many features and too much configuration for me. So, I wrote my own scripts to deal with it.

    Reolink has a built-in feature that allows you to upload motion-triggered events to an FTP server. You can customize the length, size, frequency, etc through Reolink. It’s not the best, intuitively, but it gets the job done.

    I run a local FTP server on one of my Debian machines. I have a script written in Python that continually scans the FTP directory for new files. Once one is detected, it gets copied to a new directory, sorted and named to match which camera it came from, and its metadata information gets uploaded to a MariaDB database.

    I also have a webserver. This is what I use to serve the interface for viewing my motion-triggered events. This is written in basic HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL. Through this web interface, I can delete events that have been recorded, view them, and sort them by camera. I have the script set to delete motion-triggered events older than three days.

    For continuous recording, I have another script written in Python that leverages ffmpeg to connect to the RTMP streams (this works better than RTSP for my cameras, for some reason) and continually record, but in 30-minute increments.

    I have it configured to create directories specific to the camera and the date, for easy organization and retrieval.

    It’s worked very good for me so far – and it’s free -shrug-

    As far as the quality of the cameras – not the best, but certainly not the worst. I’m satisfied for the price. No complaints.

    Also, I don’t know what these comments mean by “not allowed outside of the LAN” but I can view my cameras’ livestream through the Reolink app from anywhere, by default. I can definitely access my camera’s configuration interface and live streams outside of my home network.