Just picked up a 1080P Foscam indoor camera and a UHD 2K Amcrest camera to try out and I plan on only keeping one of them to hopefully use with smartthings and add on more later.
I was wondering what people’s opinions are between using Foscam vs Amcrest with Smartthings? I would also like to hear feedback about the two different cameras in general. I plan on the cameras recording to my NAS drive and not use cloud storage.
There are community device handlers from each and I believe they both do about the same things. Can livestream,change IR status, enable/disable motion detection, etc. The thing ST can’t do with either is directly tell them when to record. You’ll have to set that up via the camera themselves or some other software like Blue Iris.
Thank you for your replies. I looked at the Netgear Arlo solution but it is not capable of recording locally to a NAS drive or anywhere else, only to the netgear/arlo cloud servers.
I was hoping people that have the Foscam and Amcrest cameras in use with Smartthings would be able to comment on their experience using them so far.
Mine is a simple setup with 2 Amcrest and 1 Foscam cameras that are connected to Blue Iris recording on a local PC. The cameras trigger on motion but I also have an additional trigger when a door contact opens and mode is Away using the CoRE app.
Question about using Blue Iris. How does this integrate with smartthings? Will ST still be able to take snapshots and such using the cameras? Can ST trigger camera records using door/window sensors? I am a bit confused how a setup like this will work with ST.
There is a smart app that changes the Blue Iris profiles based on Smartthings mode. Then there is another that receives motion alerts from Blue Iris to trigger a virtual motion sensor in ST.Blue Iris manages when to take pictures and/or video based on the profile it is in.
Name: Garage Camera
IP: 11.0.0.160
Camera Port: 88
Username: myUser
Password: myPass
RTSP Port: 554
Enable this if the camera is HD: checked
Enable MJPEG: checked
When I hit the “Play” button on the live stream it says “Connecting” and then fails with the following message: “Camera cannot be found. We are trying to connect.”
I have confirmed that the RTSP port is set to 554 in the camera’s web interface.
I started fiddling with the Amcrest IP3M-941 and I am not really impressed with their web portals and such, I am also a bit confused how the camera seems to report to their servers even without being registered and I am wondering if there is a way to turn that off, but anyway…
I also picked up a QNAP TS-451+ that I would like to use for my recordings and hopefully run the surveillance software on the QNAP as well. I see a lot of people use Blue Iris and it integrates with ST but that is not capable of running off the QNAP.
Anyone have a recommendation to use the Amcrest with the QNAP with or without ST?