Frigate and Reolink are a good combo. Frigate is absolutely fantastic and can detect objects, sounds, and/or save clips and recordings to your pool. There's really nothing better imo.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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The answer is probably no but I wanted to ask as a sanity check: does this setup require an internet connection after the initial setup?
My family asked me to set up security cameras at my grandmas place, which has no internet and they don't want to pay monthly.
The idea is that family will visit and check the recordings regularely to see whether the services we hired do their job and not abuse my demented grandma.
I'm thinking of:
- a rpi/minipc that can do it's own hotspot
- a huge ssd slapped onto it
- web interface that visitors can log into with a password
- 2-3 wifi cameras that connect to it
It doesn't require an internet connection at all unless you want to update the firmware on the cameras 🙂 Oh, and I guess to view the web UI you'd need a LAN connection but it doesn't need to connect to the full internet.
Can confirm, I've recently got some cameras and set up Frigate and it's been great. Not using Reolink but the ones I have work well enough. I have a TPLink that I like, and a Hilook starlight camera that I am not convinced on as it doesn't seem to have auto-exposure adjustment. Both work well for object detection, though there's a bit of a learning curve with frigate needing to be configured via YAML for a lot of things.
I've also started playing with Frigate's face detection but I don't think the cameras are really positioned for it. It probably makes more sense for a front door camera getting a good view of the person.
I've also got Home Assistant picking up the frigate camera streams which works well too.
Not FOSS, and with an entry price tag, but I ditched my OPNSense firewall for a Ubiquiti UDM Pro SE router about 2 years ago and invested in 3 of their cameras plus a doorbell and love it. I previously had Blue Iris for CCTV.
The Unifi Protect app is great. Easy to navigate, great detection, and easy to store clips. There's no subscription fees, and I get a great firewall/router alongside a CCTV package.
Oh, and you can now add 3rd party cameras to the Unifi Protect system.
+1 for Unifi Protect. Their hardware may be a bit pricey, but it doesn't require any cloud/Internet connection and the app/interface is excellent.
I haven't tried the 3rd party cam support, but I don't think the price for the cameras is too outlandish for what they are and how well they're built.
Iirc the Unifi Protect software can be self-hosted now too.
Unless it changed recently if you already have 3rd party cameras, it's all but useless for any of those features. I am using Blue Iris/amcrest cameras and when I upgraded to a UDMP I was excited to try it with the new 3rd party camera support, but I can't really do anything but record. No detection stuff. Ended up only adding one camera and giving up.
And their cameras, are damn expensive. I have 6 cameras outside covering most of my house. Entireity, swapping over to unifi ones is not in the budget.
I suppose there's always a catch with them opening up for 3rd party support.
I was keen to move to Unifi primarily for a doorbell. I had a Hikvision which was very temperamental, and I didn't want a cloud based one like Ring or Nest, so believe it or not, most of my decision was made around a stupid doorbell.
Luckily I live out where nobody rings my door bell :)
I've heard good things about using https://thingino.com/ https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/wiki
There was a post 8 days ago that got quite some feedback
https://sopuli.xyz/post/34092514?scrollToComments=true
I'm just testing out thingino, but it's currently lacking features compared to amcrest.
There's no option to only save video when events trigger, so it fills the card quickly.
And I can't get the tinyCam app to access recorded files, so I have to use the web-based file browser.
But then Amcrest's apps (both old and new) have do many faults and glitchy behavior.
I'm referring to Amcrest Pro cameras, btw. They are the ones that let you configure them to be independent of their cloud service, write to a NAS, etc.
Having the motion sensor trigger saving local recordings is an idea that have gotten a positive dev response.
https://github.com/themactep/thingino-firmware/discussions/289
I can't find any discussions about accessing recordings using ONVIF or the tinycam app and don't have any cams running personally.
I am planning on using thingino with frigate nvr and network storage later on so thanks for sharing your experience!
I have a Reolink PoE camera. It's plugged into Home Assistant, and some setting in the integration had it phoning home constantly looking for updates. I turned that off and now it only connects outside of my network to sync the time.
The camera has survived outside for a few years now, so no complaints.
I have eight Reolink cameras. They’re awesome. Haven’t had any issues with them other than the occasional disconnect, which only lasts a few seconds.
When I was in the same spot, the only camera that hit all the bullet points and didn’t cost a fortune were Reolink cameras
I went with Frigate, and based on the maintainer's recommendations and on what was actually available in Europe, I went with one of the Hikvision models.
Just make sure to completely isolate them from the internet as there are some serious privacy concerns about using them online.
Oh! Interesting! The maintainer doesn't have Reolink in their recommendations. (Although... the affiliate link stuff kinda muddies the water...)
I recommend Dahua, Hikvision, and Amcrest in that order.
Here are some of the cameras I recommend:
- Loryta(Dahua) IPC-T549M-ALED-S3 (affiliate link)
- Loryta(Dahua) IPC-T54IR-AS (affiliate link)
- Amcrest IP5M-T1179EW-AI-V3 (affiliate link)
- HIKVISION DS-2CD2387G2P-LSU/SL ColorVu 8MP Panoramic Turret IP Camera (affiliate link)
There is a suggested Reolink setup mentioned though: https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/camera_specific/#reolink-cameras
Reolink has many different camera models with inconsistently supported features and behavior.
Also, dang.
WiFi cameras are not recommended as their streams are less reliable and cause connection loss and/or lost video data, especially when more than a few WiFi cameras will be used at the same time.
Are most folks using wired cameras? 😬 That seems non-trivial to wire up cameras all over...
Synology ds cam plus a whole lot of Chinese HIK vision Poe cameras. Some inside some outside. The whole thing coupled with HA. It’s been working for years now so no complaint. The one time a camera died on me the vendor replaced it free of charge which I appreciated.
I have some reolink and some amcrest, and I'd choose the amcrest (or dahua) any day tbh. Similar workload. Tensor and frigate for software NVR and object detection, all to a zfs dataset.
frigate
I'm learning more about Frigate, seems cool. Are you able to get notifications to your phone with Frigate? Actually, is there a mobile app at all? Do you need to run Home Assistant to get notifications from Frigate or can Frigate provide notifications by itself?
There is not a mobile app, no. You can pseudo install it as a PWA if using a chromium based browser though.
I do use HomeAssistant so I let it do the notifications for me, but you could easily setup pubsub and use that to hook gotify or something. Maybe it even has native webhooks at this point, I'm not sure.
Notably though I don't run frigate in HomeAssistant, it's just plugged in via API. That's to support hardware passthrough for my coral TPU.
I highly recommend it over the others. the only one I haven't tested is blue iris because it's windows only and I refuse to have a windows machine on my network. Frigate outperforms all the others that I tested. Zoneminder is a runner up but it feels dated and the object detection is a kludge.
Am also curious because I have Eufy cameras, and would like to switch at some point.
I've got a few Reolink PoE cameras of various ages floating around the house, including one that's modded to take Nikon lenses. As long as you check the model you're getting isn't locked to using their NVRs, I've had no complaints.
Currently using Blue Iris 5 with a coral tpu added on, but I'd really like to get Frigate working so I can finally ditch my last windows PC.
I've got one of the older Reolink IP cameras and the video freezes for about 10 seconds every time it switches between color and nightvision. They never even released a firmware update for it. I wouldn't trust them for anything important.
I've been satisfied with Reolink for a couple of years, and I'll be installing another next week.
I use a hardware NVR with it's own HDDs and it's own separate PoE network connecting all of the cameras, but since you are using your ZFS storage you will substitute the NVR unit with something like Blue Iris. There are several options for NVR software.
Some reolink cameras (B800 for sure) scramble the encoding to lock them to reolink NVRs. I used two of them with frigate by running neolink because fuck vendor lock in
https://github.com/QuantumEntangledAndy/neolink
I had problems with the 0.6.x series but 0.5.18 ran well enough. I abandoned those cams because they would occasionally switch to sending static to frigate and locking it down.
I have Reolinks that I just set up. The floodlight camera needed the app to set it up WiFi, BUT I didn't need an account. I can access my cameras using their app over wireguard. Its nice.
2 reolink and 1 amcrest cameras, Frigate container with a coral tpu.
The reolink cameras have slightly better picture quality, but they are shit at compressing RTSP streams, so way more data flows to get the same result as the amcrest.