Sanity check for camera installation

[timber pivot]

Hi people of the smartest homes!
I am planning to install a couple poe cameras in various places outside the home. As this will be a bit labor and cost intensive I would like to make sure that I am getting the right stuff in the first place. This will come with an overhaul of networking to support centralized power delivery, running the cables to the right places as well as the selection of cameras, and NVR and how to get those into home assistant.

The current setup is fairly simple:

• GS110EMX as main switch. Branching 10Gbe to two rooms. Dedicated PoE injector for the wifi access points in close proximity
• Two cameras over wifi with no local recording at all
• No networking to where the new cameras should go

For the cameras I would have decoded on going with Reolink, their pricing seems to be reasonable.

• 2x RLC-1212A for viewing into the driveway and garden, lower height installation
• 2x RLC-823S1 on opposite sites of the RLC-1212A for a top down view of a larger area
• (1x) their POE doorbell, but i am not too sure about that yet

Powering those devices should be done centrally but the exact selection is still a bit of a mystery. Preferably I would use less than more switches to keep the energy overhead low.

• 2x USW-Flex to split power towards the cameras in their respective locations
• (A) replace the GS110EMX with a USW-Pro-8-PoE; PoE++ to the USW-Flex, use PoE+ for one of the access points.
• (B) add a USW-Flex-2.5G-8-PoE to power the USW-Flex as well as one of the access points; keep the GS110EMX (B.2) replace the GS110EMX with either a USW-Flex-XG or CRS305

The recordings / detections should reasonably be stored for a while. Preferably I would use Frigate as I can roll that next to home assistant without additional hardware. This would however need to be able to utilize PTZ controls and some low compute overhead to display everything in home assistant.

Does this sound somewhat reasonable or did I miss something?

[leaden schooner]

I would highly suggest reconsidering the reolink 12MP cameras, the extra resolution won't be that helpful, and especially not when the image sensor is 1/2.49" (even for 8MP cameras you want 1/1.2"). In general you would be much better served with something like the CX-410 or CX-810 as they have much larger image sensors that can see better at night while still having plenty of resolution for clarity during the day.

See https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/getting-cameras-with-the-right-mp-to-sensor-size-ratio.67642/ for more details

[timber pivot]

that is a very good tip!
as those dont seem to offer ir nightvision, do you know if the video quality would still be reasonable to identify moving objects?

[leaden schooner]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3G_2zVu3cU&pp=ygUQdGhlIGhvb2t1cCBjeDQxMA%3D%3D has some good comparisons

[timber pivot]

Seems like he also did a video on the other reolink ones!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InBRTveD9_w

[leaden schooner]

yeah that's probably a good watch too

[timber pivot]

much more complex than i thought ^^

[timber pivot]

Hmm it seems like getting those kinda cameras to work with Frigate is still a very mixed bag

[leaden schooner]

Depends what camera you get

anything 5MP or lower and fairly recent like the Reolink Doorbell, CX-410, etc. works without any issues using the recommended config in the Frigate docs

[timber pivot]

Is there a reason for why those work better/at all?

[leaden schooner]

Because reolink's RTSP streams very often have stability issues due to a far-from-perfect implementation. Meanwhile, their http-flv stream is much more stable. However, http-flv does not (currently, there is a new format that does) support h265, and any cameras with resolution > 5MP requires h265 on reolink cameras

it is sort of YMMV, some users use rtsp and say that there are no issues, but in general we continue to see users that have issues and then when they switch to the http-flv stream everything works stable

[timber pivot]

That's pretty unfortunate :/ I guess 5MP would be a big upgrade already to what's installed currently, tho there don't seem to be any usable ptz ones around in that range.

Considering distances are quite non optimal once roof mounted :/

[leaden schooner]

are you talking second story roof mounted?

[timber pivot]

Pretty much yea