It’s easier and much safer to run ethernet cable than power. And you can power the cameras over the ethernet cable. You just need a POE injector. They are cheap.
I just setup 2 HIKvision bullet cameras. I got a cheap wifi-texas POE injector. I hooked up the garage camera via a powerline internet adapter. I just used the existing power line to get internet out there. . . . I’ve got them both hooked up to Surveillance Station on Synology’s Diskstation which is pretty well integrated into ST.
I have the diskstation copying files over to Amazon Cloud drive. There are other options, but the cloud drive gives you unlimited storage for $60 a year. It’s fast. I watch the videos from the cloud drive using Amazon’s app or web page. I saw no benefit to the video integration into ST. It was slow and doesn’t offer the user any way to manage what’s stored on ST’s servers.
The ST integration with Surveillance Station gives you the ability to capture a still and see it in the ST app. That’s useful and it often works. Though the stills frequently don’t get stored by ST.
I have an old Diskstation, the 211j. I ordered another one to handle the increased load. They came out with an inexpensive one this year, the 216j. It’s only $169. I should have mine any day now. . . .
I mailed the Arlo back to Amazon this morning. It was pretty, but not very useful.
Sorry when I said I don’t mind running power what I meant was that I have power close to where I want my cameras. I don’t have a way to run wire, I have no attic just hight ceilings and I have a lower finished floor so upper floor has no easy way to run any wires. So I need a wireless solution or I pretty much can’t install.
I don’t really care about ST integration. I started the thread here because I respect the opinions of the ST community. But I really want a camera that don’t need ST to work because I don’t trust ST. If it works with ST but doesn’t need it that’s a plus but not a requirement.
Ah, I see. I have a half finished basement. It makes running wires a huge pain. That’s why I went with Arlo at first. . . . . I’ve dug some trenches in the dry wall for speaker wires. I think I’m going to have to pull some baseboards off for another run. The finished basement forces all kinds of indirect wire runs. . . . Good luck. I fear you might have to rip up a wall or two.
If you do go the Arlo route, make sure they have a full wifi signal. When mine was reading only 75% strength, it had a terrible stutter and chewed up the batteries. But when the signal was strong, the battery life stabilized and the stutter when away.
@Ron - Arlo does not need ST integration especially if you are using them indoors. The reason that people are integration Arlo cameras is if the cameras are outdoors and/or they are trying to conserve battery life by activating/de-activating the cameras only in certain situations, such as they will be away from home or to de-activate them if they are home. Without ST integration the cameras will record video with every detected motion. Your choice as to whether to integrate or not. I love mine so far, but I will see how I feel if I am constantly having to change batteries.
Thanks for the feedback. I have a eero wifi mesh network so pretty solid signals at every corner of my home. Not sure about outside for the outdoor camera’s though so I might need to add an error node in my garage or something to fix that or add a indoor access point wired to the outdoor camera.
The reviews I have read state that the Arlo camera’s react so slow on their motion detection that the video clip it records doesn’t capture anything. Are you finding otherwise ?
@Ron - I don’t think that I am experiencing more than a 1 to 2 second delay. My main purpose is to capture intruders trying to defeat my door locks. I still have to do more tests but I am not sure the people having problems have their cameras set up properly. I’ll let you know after I’ve done more tests. So far I’m loving them.
It’s so slow I found it largely useless. I could walk up to my porch, pick up a package, and the camera might, at best, capture me walking away. I got a bunch of videos of the UPS guy walking away, nearly out of view. This is the main reason I sent mine back yesterday.
You also can’t configure it to record until the motion is over. . . .
@asmuts
t’s so slow I found it largely useless. I could walk up to my porch, pick up a package, and the camera might, at best, capture me walking away. I got a bunch of videos of the UPS guy walking away, nearly out of view. This is the main reason I sent mine back yesterday.
You also can’t configure it to record until the motion is over.
I am sorry yours did not work out for you. I just tested mine and got a very different outcome than you did. I walked out to my car and set the routine to turn on my back porch camera. I walked back to my porch and within 1 second of stepping onto my porch I received a text notification and an indication that Arlo had a new video. The video started as soon as I came in range of the camera’s motion detector. You can not view the recording until it has finished recording, but everything is in the video. 1 second delay.
That’s great. I’ve never heard of anyone getting such a quick response. If mine worked like that, I would have kept it. No question. Too bad. I was seeing 3-4 second lags.
@asmuts - Please consider what I am about to say. Even though you had a 3 - 4 second delay and could not see someone who quickly came to your door and left, from a security point of view that delay would not be too much of an issue. Example: when my home was burglarized, (probably by neighbors), the burglars came up to my front door and used a chisel to chisel away my door frame around my door handle and deadbolt lock. It must have taken them 5 to 10 minutes to do this and even with the delay I would have many video clips to identify them. Another example. Often burglars will come to the door and knock to see if anyone is home. Even if they wait 10 - 15 seconds for someone to open the door you have them on video. The third example is if you are monitoring your windows it would take a burglar about 30 seconds to climb in the window and more time if there were more than 1 person. That is plenty of time to record the event.
@asmuts - one other thing. I purchased my cameras a couple of weeks ago. When I set up an account from their main web site Arlo said my hub was running on older software and recommended I update the hub software. There were a couple of updates. I believe they fixed the delay problems in these updates. That is probably why my cameras only have a very short delay.
I can speak about Blink a little bit. Blink is working on local storage (the sync module has a USB port to connect a drive) and I believe has mentioned adding the ability to record while watching video at some point. They also released (or will soon be releasing) an upgrade to roughly double the battery life of the camera, which should hopefully allow them to increase recording length. Personally, I wish they’d just let you record whatever length you want and just warn you of the potential battery life consequences. That, or if the camera is powered, disable the recording length parameter. I personally think the Blink ecosystem is really good and just needs a few tweaks to be stellar. Also, keep in mind that even though the max recording length is 10 seconds currently, I believe you can configure the timeout so that another recording can kick off within a few seconds - I don’t have the app with me to verify, but I believe that was mentioned in the RBoy Blink thread.
FWIW, Blink is supposed to announce outdoor cameras (and possibly a second gen indoor camera) sometime this year. There is supposed to be a major patch coming soon according to some sources, but I haven’t seen detail about what is in the patch - I suspect it may be the local recording, longer recording lengths, and enabling of the sync module Ethernet port, but I am just guessing at this stage.
I will give you some food for thought about the cloud recording aspect - it does sound annoying, but there is some logic to it. Let’s say your cameras caught some guy in your house and recorded video to a local drive. What happens if the guy sees the drive and steals it? You’ve lost the video.
For me, I bought Blink because it was significantly cheaper than anything else and I didn’t want to run power to all of the locations where I run the cameras. It needs some tweaks, but I think it is a solid system. I have 10 cameras currently and once the outdoor ones are released, may add another sync module and several of those as well.
Thanks to all the new age consumer cloud cameras, I think most folks will assume all camera videos are being recorded offsite in the cloud. So I am not sure a thief breaking in is going to look for a onsite storage system.
But none the less the professional systems and cameras have very flexible storage and notification options as well. WIth some cameras I have, I can store to and SD or HDD at the edge (Camera), on a localized or cloud based (OR BOTH) centralized storage system, I can have it email me with a picture, a video clip, I can have it FTP files, etc… basically limitless options that allow me to store and alert locally and offsite.
I like options. I dislike being required to pump everything to a cloud I can’t control.
I totally agree but both Arlo and Blink have one limitation that killed both for me. They use the 2.4ghz band, which in my neighborhood is too crowded making it hard to maintain. Delays, buffering and drops are common with both if your wifi is not strong. Especially Arlo hub, it’s a powerful router that competes with any connected devices, and because you cannot change the Arlo channel it could kill your zigbee mesh.
Yeah, that’s a good point. My wifi is very strong - I use an older Asus AC68U router and it overs all of my nearly 3000 sq ft house, my 1000 ft patio, and just about my entire yard. My house is mostly brick with some cedar trim so I thought I’d have a lot of signal attenuation when going outside but it works great. When we take walks in the neighborhood, my phone even detects it with decent signal a couple houses down, which amazes me.
I am planning on mounting my 10th camera in my covered front porch to watch my door and porch for deliveries, prankers, and would-be “scouts.” I went out this morning to test and see if I could even get signal out there - I knew I’d get Wi-Fi signal, but I thought the sync module’s signal would be too weak since it is at nearly the other side of the house. Sure enough, the thing connected fine and video looked great. I was contemplating putting a Ring Pro doorbell out there, but unless I can score a really good deal on one, I think Blink will work for me.
You are right. For the big stuff that matters, a 3 second delay isn’t much of a problem. But it was a problem for the petty stuff I was trying to catch on camera. Around here people have been breaking into cars (unlocked cars). I always lock mine, but I wanted to catch someone trying to open the door. The recording delay made that nearly impossible. I also worry about people taking stuff off my porch and out of my mail box. And people have been crossing through yards on their stealing sprees. . . Again, I needed something fast. But for major break in, a 3 second delay isn’t going to be a problem.
I updated the firmware moments after I took them out of the box. And I checked again a week later to make sure it was current. That wasn’t the issue. The 3-4 second delay seems to be the norm, at least, from looking at reviews it is a very common complaint that can’t be chalked up to old firmware in my case.
Yes. The Arlo hub has a very powerful router. I didn’t realize that it was the Arlo at first. I thought my neighbors must have had an extremely powerful router that won’t get off my channel. My wifi was very problematic for a while. I can’t say for certain that it was Arlo causing the issue, as I’m in a new house and I keep changing things. . . .
Oh, I completely agree. IMO, Blink should’ve had local storage and the sync module Ethernet port enabled on release and I can’t understand why it hasn’t been done yet. The ethernet port is especially baffling to me. They’ve had some solid updates but nothing that I recall recently so hopefully that means we’re going to get something good soon, either in terms of an upgrade or product announcements.
Also, a thief probably wouldn’t be looking for a storage drive when he/she enters the house, but if you have a USB drive near a bunch of other equipment, it might be part of the haul. A thief would go crazy if he got into my house and got into my office, but there’s so much stuff to grab and so little time he’d probably miss my drive.
Very Valid point. I think a thief could enter much quicker then 5-10 minutes but likely it will always take long enough 10 seconds for example to allow camera capture. I guess I just don’t like alerts that leave me wondering what trigger it when it was just a delivery or something quick. But your point is well taken and I should really reconsider my decision to rule out Arlo.
This is my reason for wanting both local and cloud. Local in case cloud fails and cloud in case thief takes the recording device. That said I have a really good place to hide my storage that I don’t think a thief would find or have the time to find at the very least.
What does this mean? Are you saying I have to be watching the video to record it. That seems useless. I want it to record local and cloud automatically so I can see what happened should an event be triggered.
Good point. I have been interested in blink for this reason. I have to watch them more carefully for upcoming updates. Unfortunately I need something sooner rather than later so I might have to go a more expensive route.
[quote=“Ron, post:39, topic:58421, full:true”]
What does this mean? Are you saying I have to be watching the video to record it. That seems useless. I want it to record local and cloud automatically so I can see what happened should an event be triggered.[/QUOTE]
No, that isn’t what I mean. Several people have requested the ability to hit the record button while they’re watching live video. Right now, the ONLY way to record video on Blink that I’m aware of is via the motion detection.
Yeah, I really thought Blink would’ve made an announcement by now regarding their new cameras and also would’ve had local storage in place. Not sure what is taking them so long.
