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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: Naweo on Thu, 09 July 2020, 03:13:04
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Hey, I was looking through the internet and have been thinking on building my own video surveillance system for my home versus theft and stuff.
I was thinking that, technically, you could just have a pc with a webcam or two and livestream 24/7 at targeted areas around your home.
What would be an optimal, similar solution without having to buy commercial solutions?
Thank you!
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there is a youtuber with the channel "diyperks" who recently made a video about a homemade video surveillance system out of broken laptops, so i guess the answer is yes you definitely can, but depending on where you live you may have data cap problems with streaming 24/7 and security/privacy issues too
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Well, I do not necessarily have to stream it. I just need like remote control or just have the camera directly plugged to a specific Computer.
Imagine setting up an ordinary PC that makes as little noice as possible. Plug in two webcams and let it run 24/7.
Then just have an auto-login teamviewer or something, as it is for non-commercial use.
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Sounds like it would be waaay more reliable and simpler just to buy an Arlo or two.
You could cobble something together out of webcams and PCs. Something like a couple of wireless webcams, a control system like BlueIris (paid, and cheap, not sure about free alternatives). Blue Iris comes with phone apps for remote viewing.
You wouldn't really be live streaming though, you'd mainly be interested in recording footage. Storage would be local- the amount of bandwidth required to upload realtime footage from higher res webcams is fairly significant.
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Sounds like it would be waaay more reliable and simpler just to buy an Arlo or two.
at least for me 99% of the fun in those project is the making it out of trash that no one else cares about (old broken laptops here), and having 100% control on the system is a nice bonus, yeah it is less reliable but you can fix it when it is down, and if the company selling your cameras goes under or just decides to stop supporting them you will have a few expensive "fake" security cameras so even the reliability of those solutions can be put into question.
To be honest when i thought about that for myself i never thought about the streaming part, i was planing on going with obs and saving to my nas with an overwrite every week or so.
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I'm the same, I built a system around Blue Iris and VPNs for remote viewing. But I've realised that the vast majority of people don't really want to DIY, and it's best suited to when you want to spend as much time troubleshooting as using the system :)
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I actually did this with my old roommate in the early '00s. We got 5 used black and white cc tv cameras and wired them to an old ThinkPad to record our living room during parties so we could capture any wild **** that went down. We had to constantly erase the hd though because it filled up in like an hour, but that was tech limitations of the times.
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Is it possible? Yes
Is it practical? No.
The sad part is, it's actually gotten more difficult as time goes on.
It used to be that the hardware was expensive, the software efficient (to cut down on hardware) and routing was cheap. These days the hardware is cheap and the software got stupid because of it, and the routing (and software) has been taken over by the cloud.
You can still do it but the offerings are actually not as good they used to be for free.
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Naweo's new Camgirl career.