Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

I got a lot of 6 Axis cameras from eBay, it was around $200. I think they took them off a school or something but they were in great shape. They look great and have no spyware etc because it’s an industrial company. I recommend getting some industrial surplus because they tend not to have all the bloatware and have significantly better weatherproofing, casing, etc, even if the optics are the same as the consumer units.

I was under the impression that most commercial/industrial cameras all required some kind of proprietary ecosystem of peripherals and controllers. Do those work with open source DVR solutions like frigate? (If so, did you know that before you bought them?)

Onvif is the keyword, if it’s supported it works with frigate. I think most of the industrial cams are not as locked down as you might think. They are infrastructure so vendors aren’t going to force customers to tear down their existing setup.

This! I manage about 70 CCTV cameras, over the past 15 years. Partially as a hobby. and axis cameras are the best bar none. They are expensive, but if you don’t have a need for the latest gen axis, then eBay is your friend, along with one or two generation prior of axis current gen cams. They are just very well thought out in terms of installation, and ui/operation. Axis is among the most responsive to security issues (which mostly can be negated by controlling your cameras at the network level through vlans and firewall rules). They have a very intuitive web based UI, for example one well thought out ability is through events/rules- you can add a physical SD card into the camera and set up a rule that if the video feed is not being accessed ( set a inverse trigger for “live stream accessed”) then start recording to the on-cam SD card (i.e. your NVR has gone off-line or a network issue is stopping the feed, then you have onboard storage saving that video). That’s just one example.

Another method that most cameras support (if you want the bare basics of record video/audio) is accessing an RTSP stream from the camera. In fact RTSP streams are the primary way you get video into frigate specifically. Some of the more fancy cam manufacturers (axis), are just now starting to support encrypted RTSP , but most of it is unencrypted. you can enable authentication, however in general if you’re doing this over the Internet you do it over a VPN via un encrypted rtsp