Frigate

Put the cams on their own VLAN with no route to the internet and let Frigate pull the RTSP streams. Block DNS for that VLAN too, or they'll keep trying to phone home. Curious what you pick for the NVR side.

Please use the cross-post feature next time if you want to post in multiple communities. Some clients can bundle them as a single post. :)

I have a reolink setup that I am about to expand. I had it set up initially through frigate, as others have recommended. However, I found that setup was not simple (although lots of documentation). More importantly, it was slightly burdensome on my setup. If you have a reasonably robust system, it shouldn't be an issue, but be aware of the system requirements.

Instead, I decided to use on-board capabilities. It was not advertised, but the cameras I chose have an internal SD card slot. It's a bit of work, but if you set it up on a closed network, you can access their features over IP directly without any internet access. Live feed is visible from home assistant or other options. Since the processing and storage is on the device itself, there is no drain on the server.

https://thingino.com/ and https://frigate.video/ are a good way to setup your own camera system.

Barlus cameras can be pretty good, but they're expensive. Poe, local web interface, onvif, up to ip68, some with night vision and built in ir+white LEDs.

I think the management interface can reach out to their server but you can block that.

I use one in my indoor pond to run a daily Livestream and it's quite nice.

But afaik no storage built in you'd have to manage that with some software on your own.

Give your cameras a default route to an unused ip. This prevents internet access if vlans and firewalling is not available.

Frigate is pretty good, you can spin up a container and attach storage as mount point.

And keep firmware up to date.