Multiple locations w/cameras & doorbells

[rar2667]

Looking for advice on handling multiple locations. I have HS4 Pro on a PC at primary residence mainly for controlling lights. Have a HS Pi at lake home with an Amcrest camera.

Thinking of adding a video doorbell at primary residence, so wondering about using the Amcrest video doorbell vs. Ring. Need to understand tying all the locations together. Is Blue Iris an option? Currently, I'm logging into MyHS with 2 identities depending on whether I want primary residence or lake.

Thoughts?

[Pete]

The Ring doorbell / alarm is a closed cloud system. That said you can utilize a Ring to MQTT app to tap in to the video / sensors. No ONVIF or RTSP streams are accessible on the Ring Doorbell.

Here using the Hikvision doorbell and have removed it from the cloud connection and do RTSP / ONVIF / JPG captures to Blue Iris (testing), Zoneminder and the OmniPro2 Panel (for Omnitouch screens). Only access home devices via an OpenVPN client running on whatever client I am using outside of my home.

Is Blue Iris an option?

It is for managing local cameras. Remote cameras might be an issue depending on ISP bandwidth. Symmetrical bandwidth would be nice.

For one camera Blue Iris would be overkill. Homeseer would do fine with one camera.

[wpiman]

I have Blue Iris at our home for our camera, and we added a secondary one at a remote house. We have a VPN to the house-- but ended up putting a second machine there running Blue Iris.

[Wade]

Looking for advice on handling multiple locations. I have HS4 Pro on a PC at primary residence mainly for controlling lights. Have a HS Pi at lake home with an Amcrest camera.

Thinking of adding a video doorbell at primary residence, so wondering about using the Amcrest video doorbell vs. Ring. Need to understand tying all the locations together. Is Blue Iris an option? Currently, I'm logging into MyHS with 2 identities depending on whether I want primary residence or lake.

Thoughts?

We have a similar configuration of two residences, albeit with more cameras. At our primary residence we have 12 cameras including an Amcrest AD410 at the front door. We have Blue Iris running on a separate physical server from our HS4 server. At the weekend house we have 6 cameras with Blue Iris and HS4 running on the same PC--a 10-year old Dell laptop (i7-2720QM, 8GB RAM). The two homes are connected by a site-to-site VPN between Unifi routers at each end. The weekend house has symmetric 300Mb internet with fixed IP (both good for VPN purposes) and our primary has asymmetric internet with dynamic IP. We use noip.com for free DDNS. As for tying the two sets of cameras together, Blue Iris 5 allows connection to multiple sites from a single session, but it's more like switching between consoles than actually integrating multiple sites into a single console. I use this some, but more often just RDP into the remote machine and open BI5 directly from there. I've never tried connecting to a remote camera across the VPN. My gut tells me it would be problematic.

I agree with Pete that BI is overkill for a single camera, but if you plan to add more cameras it's a great solution. BI5 has incorporated some great improvements. All my cameras at both locations record sub stream continuously 24/7 and main stream when triggered--with remarkably modest CPU and RAM requirements. And DeepStack AI running at both locations in conjunction with BI has eliminated essentially 100% of shadow/rain/wind false triggers.

Our Amcrest AD410 doorbell cam is interfaced with HS4 via amcrest2mqtt running on an rpi and the mcsMQTT plugin. We don't use HS4's camera functionality, but we can pick up motion, human detection, doorbell presses, etc, and use them to trigger automations. BI5 also has built-in MQTT functionality that can be used for external interface, too.

Feel free to ask here or PM me if you want more detail on any of the above.

[rar2667]

Thanks Wade and Pete.

My lake house has symmetrical 100Mb fiber, but home has 600Mb down/25 Mb up cable. It seems like the biggest thing for me would be accessing either place on my phone. I put a Ring Doorbell in for my mom and like the iPhone app. I also use the AmCrest iPhone app for my existing lake camera because I had trouble getting the camera up in HS4 on the HTPi. Is it possible to add cameras from 2 locations to the same Amcrest IOS app?

I need to think about the local storage, etc. so I may need to put in a PC at the lake instead of the HTPi.

I appreciate all the info.

[Pete]

Good news on your ISP transport. It is difficult now a days to get symmetrical up / down. For some reason most ISPs only do this for business accounts but not for residential accounts.

It's really what you are most comfortable with. If you go from local storage to cloud storage you have a subscription. If you go to local storage then you have to maintain an NVR.

I am old school here and prefer not to utilize the cloud if I do not need to. Same with a preference over wired versus wireless interfaces.

I use OpenVPN server running on two PFSense boxes at two locations. Only thing is access is to one location at a time. Using the cloud I would be able to get to the two locations at one time on my Android phone. I could run an openvpn client to get to main house and in the main house run another VPN client to get to 2nd house then access both house's CCTV.

Not sure relating to the iPhone apps and multiple site access.

Multiple Amazon devices under one account at two locations works fine for me.

Here last week found out that the Ring app doesn't work on the newes Mac build and that there is no Blink web page for Blink cameras management. IE: only iPhone and Android apps can be used.

Currently having some issues with a HS user in LAS that went to a Speco CCTV system with NVR and cloud access. Wierd that it is only 2 cameras of 4-6 cameras that are not functioning correctly.

[dweingartner]

Pete did you have any success with the Specs cams? I've just acquired a client with a Speco system and I cannot get them to appear in HS4. rtsp strings work just fine in VLC.

[Rupp]

Pete did you have any success with the Specs cams? I've just acquired a client with a Speco system and I cannot get them to appear in HS4. rtsp strings work just fine in VLC.

If the camera doesn't auto add you'll need to use a snapshot URL for use within HS4.

[John.O]

Wade
Do you have a sample configuration file for the AC410? Everything I've been able to find so far assumes you are a pro at Docker and amcrest2mqtt.
Any help you can offer would be appreciated thank you.

John

[Wade]

Wade
Do you have a sample configuration file for the AC410? Everything I've been able to find so far assumes you are a pro at Docker and amcrest2mqtt.
Any help you can offer would be appreciated thank you.

John

Sure.

docker-compose.yaml

version: "3"
services:
  amcrest2mqtt:
    container_name: amcrest2mqtt
    image: dchesterton/amcrest2mqtt:latest
    restart: always
    environment:
      AMCREST_HOST: <camera IP>
      AMCREST_PASSWORD: <camera password>
      MQTT_HOST: <mqtt server IP>
      MQTT_USERNAME: <mqtt username>
      MQTT_PASSWORD: <mqtt password>
      HOME_ASSISTANT: "false"​

Don't include the brackets when entering <values>.

[Pete]

did you have any success with the Specs cams?

These were first generation Speco IP dome cameras and were replaced a few years later.

[John.O]

What I have found out so far

USING
##
Amcrest AD410 video doorbell
amcrest2mqtt 1.0.16
Docker EngineVersion: 23.0.3
HomeSeer HS4 Pi Hub G2 Edition 4.2.18.3 (Linux)
mcsMQTT 6.3.1.0


THE FILE
##
version: "3"
services:
amcrest2mqtt:
container_name: backdoor
image: dchesterton/amcrest2mqtt:latest
privileged: true
restart: always
environment:
AMCREST_HOST: 10.10.10.10
AMCREST_USERNAME: admin
AMCREST_PASSWORD: nocaps
MQTT_HOST: 10.10.10.11
MQTT_PORT: 1883
MQTT_USERNAME: home
MQTT_PASSWORD: 1234567890
HOME_ASISTANT: "true"


##
privileged, Needs to be set to true so python can run without errors.
AMCREST_PASSWORD, For me it needed to be all lower case. Did not error just did not word with upper case.
MQTT_HOST,Did not like 127.0.0.1 or localhost need to be the ip of the host.
MQTT_USERNAME/PASSWORD, Something about new security,had to be set.
amcrest2mqtt, Does not understand "human detect".

I have the door bell,motion and status(online/offline) working in Homeeer.

John