Hi!
Years ago I bought a cheap CCTV video recorder kit from China. It’s branded Floureon and it has 4 BNC analog video inputs for cameras. It is working fine, but I am looking for a replacement.
My two issues are - integration with openhab. Namely… the current one only outputs rtsp over network. And integrating rtsp into openhab is a no-go. So from what I see there is an onvif ip camera binding, and the other is mjpeg stream. I’ve tried playing around with mjpeg and it works fine for my needs (but sadly my nvr doesn’t output it).
The other issue - I need two more cameras. I would much prefer these to be ip cameras, but analog bnc is fine. I know that there are hybrid nvrs out there that support both.
Does anyone have any experience and recommendations for this? I was looking at something like: https://www.amazon.fr/FLOUREON-Vidésorurveillance-Extérieur-Détection-Mouvement/dp/B0744H2QX8
(it’s a French store, forgive me).
Sadly I don’t know if onvif means that it actually acts as an onvif camera or that it can only connect to an onvif camera. Plus I have no idea if this one would output mjpeg.
You can get it working by doing this if you have enough CPU or you lower the quality settings enough.
Recommend you look at Amcrest, Dahua , Foscam (no smart alarms like the other three), or Hikvision and any NVR that supports BNC will probably cost more than a packaged deal that is IP/POE based only. You can use your BNC cables to pull though cat5/6 which makes it very easy to upgrade.
I doubt that my Raspberry Pi 3B+ would be happy processing video from 6 cameras at the same time. Although the current NVR does provide a low quality video stream which should in theory be ok. I will do a few experiments though. Although I do have a more capable media server at home as well that I could probably use for this.
Of course I still need an NVR which has two more inputs.
While the IP NVRs from these manufacturers seem reasonably priced, they really aren’t useful to me since I would still need to replace all of the cameras. And we are getting into the a bit expensive territory then.
I am also definitely not replacing the existing cameras with PoE based ones. Wifi maybe, although it would still be a hassle getting power to them (I could probably rewire the current power connectors - they could also be compatible out of the box). Replacing the current cabling would be nightmare though. The wires aren’t in cable channels or anything like that. Some of them are routed under roof tiling and they were certainly not easy to get there.
Really all I need is recording capability and the ability to view video when I am at home (via habpanel) or away. And the current system seems completely capable of doing that. The only issue is the lack of mjpeg output. And I know that some of these chinese NVRs do output it as well.
I would never use wifi cameras. Anyone can buy a $40 wifi jamming device and your camera system fails to work. If your camera is for watching a dog when u r not home then who cares but if it is for security I would never use wifi cameras. Poe is very easy just use the old cables to pull the new ones through and you won’t need to lift tiles unless some idiot installed cable clamps or zip ties in hard to reach places.
Have a read up on the smart alarms and how they reduce false positives for motion detection. With home automation having as many abilities to trigger events with low false positives is a good thing.
Well the cameras are not the primary security system. They are more of an addition to it. We have a professional alarm system (so not something that you buy at a local hardware store for 200€) installed in the house. That thing is there to provide security. Cameras are an add-on that we use to check if something is going on when the alarm triggers.
But most of the time the cameras are there more to occasionally check if somebody is outside of the house. Maybe check who is ringing the door bell, check if somebody in the family is outside or if they are in the garage or something. Stuff like that basically. I don’t have the alarm trigger input on the NVR wired and I don’t use any of the motion detection features either.
Well in the end I bought one of those Floureon DVRs ( slightly different one that I linked in my first post). So I now have 8 total cameras. Sadly the DVR doesn’t have an mjpeg stream either.
So I used the method linked above with ffserver to transcode the streams into mjpeg. I don’t run this on my Openhab raspberry though. I am running it on my fileserver (since it is always running anyways). It has a dual core intel celeron and it uses about 15% of CPU power to process 8 cameras in full resolution with quite reasonable bitrate and FPS.
