Be careful of what camera you get. My wife was breast feeding our child and people started talking to her. It was an “Amcrest” camera. Amcrest is actually a Chinese company and their firmware has holes the size of the Grand Canyon. If you confine it to your local network it would probably be fine but I just wanted to give you a heads up to DYOR on the security offered by each option.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Which amcrest camera did you have? If you have the pro based cameras you can disable P2P and DLNA (I believe DLNA is disabled by default)
I have all reolink cameras. I put them in a separate vlan with no internet access or DNS just LAN access. They are by far my favourite and already have tight integration support in home assistant.
I have two dcs-6100h for 9€ each that work just fine locally. Good ir night vision, very sensitiv mic and USB powered for trips.
I'm here for suggestions. Been using a xiaomi for a year but getting the thing configured on the go is a freaking pain.
We use reolink E1 cameras, and they work pretty well, not perfect. No sound alarm, and depending on the E1 vs. E1 Zoom vs. E1 Pro have different connectivity. But they are fine.
I have Frigate set up with an Amcrest IP2M. I ended up buying a second wifi AP because my 2.4GHz was really clogged up after turning it on (probably related to a bunch of other stuff already on the same network).
It "phones home" a lot so I put it on a separate vlan and disabled internet access for it.
I tried and there is a noticeable delay / lag when using a wifi camera. I recommend using a real baby cam with a dedicated RF link to the base station like those made by Infant Optics. If u want to add a wifi based one as a supplement/ to feed the NVR, check out wyze v1 cams with the RTSP firmware.
I don't have any but I've seen reolink mentioned a lot, cheaper would be tapo camera (what I have), I know some tapo have baby cry alert but don't know if this function works with hacs component. For Tapo, once setup inside app you can block internet access to the camera threw your router or else. https://github.com/JurajNyiri/HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control
I too have a tp-link tapo indoor camera with said hacs component. I have set alerts for sound and movement, both work well, it need some tuning tough, like mic sensitivity...
For live video feed I use a webrtc camera from hacs as it has much better latency.
As a child monitor it works really well.
Thanks for the heads-up, haven't tried webrtc. Something still missing for me is person detection, with luck it will be added in future as this has been requested by some user to tplink R&D (at this moment, this feature doesn't comply with onvif standard).
None the less, they are good and cheap devices.
FYI: Babycam manufacturers claim you shouldn't use IP cameras because they're not as reliable as their products. I think that mostly applies to the reliable triggering on sound (if the baby cries).
I've used 3 unrelated baby cams and junked them all because not one was remotely usable, never mind reliable.
That was a decade ago, but we had pretty solid ip cameras a decade ago.
Fair enough. I don't have any first hand experience to offer. But I think I read a test of baby monitors in some consumer magazine a while back. As far as I remember few of them were good. Maybe you got one of the several bad models. My friends have some audio only monitors. They fail safe, you immediately hear static noise once the connection gets interrupted. But yeah, they only transmit a few hundred meters because it's radio signals. It's not like an IP cam where you can watch your baby from another continent.