Is this for your home? Just wondering as I am also looking at various systems.

Yes its for my home.

I installed an IP system recently. I got an Amcrest with six 3mp bullet cams. It's a great system. I got a deal on it thru Meh.com.

Amcrest has a really nice iOS app that allows full access to all the cams and recordings. You can always get a 2-4 cam system now and add to it later to keep the price down. Just make sure you get an NVR with enough channels to add as many cameras you might want in the future.

This is a geeky forum to take a deep dive into the IP cam world: https://ipcamtalk.com/

Thanks for that forum link. :-)

I haven't looked into this closely, but one of the things that bothers me about what I've seen casually is that many (most? all?) new residential IP cam systems require an internet connection and rely on the manufacturer's servers.

Aside from the privacy implications of your video constantly being sent to servers of unknown security that you don't control and don't know who can access, what happens if the company goes out of business in 10 years, or 5 years, or 1 year? Most likely, you end up with a box full of useless hardware.

I use a few IP cameras for various purposes around the house. They're mostly old low-res Axis cameras. They stay entirely on my local network, and I use the open source program Zoneminder on an ancient dedicated laptop to monitor them. I have no privacy concerns, nor do I have to think about what happens if Axis goes out of business.

I don't want video being sent to servers and am not considering anything that would do that. However I do require the ability to remotely monitor the cameras. How else would you do that if you did not have an internet connection?

My IP cam is not connected to any remote server and this isn't really a thing in the IP cam world. The NVR has the server and hard drive built in and I can access it remotely and securely via the internet. You might be thinking of the non-IP cam's that use remote servers like Nest or Arlo. These are different.

Thanks for clarifying that, Rich.

I'm not an expert on this, but as I understand it, unless your system does upload its video to remote servers somewhere, the only way that you can monitor it remotely is to open an incoming port on your home router, bypassing its firewall. FWIW, I did this for a while with a couple of my cameras.

That's always a security risk. The net is crawling with troublemakers whose scripts are constantly looking for such open ports and, on finding them, trying to crack what's connected to them.

I guess the amount of risk depends on how strong the security is in your monitoring software and/or cameras, and how much a bad guy can accomplish if he or she does get through.

If a camera is connected to the internet in order to be monitored remotely, then it's connected to servers--lots of them. It has to be; that's how the internet works.

And opening a port on the home router does nothing. Your phone (or remote computer) can't 'look in' to your house, the images have to be fed out to your monitoring point.

For viewing many IP cameras over the net, you do NOT have to have it upload to a remote server, because the camera itself contains a web server.

Any portable device such as a phone, tablet, or laptop with a web browser most certainly CAN look into your home network and see that web server. You just have to configure your router to pass through incoming requests on an http port such as 80, 8008, 8080, or any of several other http ports less often used.

Once the router is set up to allow port forwarding, you can point your portable gadget's web browser at your home IP address (and port number if it's not the default 80), and log in to the camera's web server.

The camera's server pushes a series of jpeg images (motion jpeg) to your
browser. Some cameras even have mpeg encoders built in, and can
stream to an mpeg decoder on your device.

I know this works, because I've done it with my own cameras.

Many cameras even have a public view that doesn't require a login.Here's one you can see right now. Here's another. And another. And another. And yet another.

There are thousands more of these cameras out there on the net, open to anyone who wants to view them. You can password-protect yours if you want to, as I did.

Why did you choose to run CAT6 instead of CAT5? We are at this stage and just wondering... What did you run to your TVs?

CAT 6 is the current standard and has been for quite a while. Using it future-proofs your home's networking (much higher throughput and lower noise for long runs). And the price is the same, so why not go with the good stuff?

Rich

My IP cam is not connected to any remote server and this isn't really a thing in the IP cam world. The NVR has the server and hard drive built in and I can access it remotely and securely via the internet. You might be thinking of the non-IP cam's that use remote servers like Nest or Arlo. These are different.

No I was talking about IP cams. And I now know that yes, it is possible to access the IP cam, that is connected to the NVR, remotely, via an app.

I actually just purchased an NVR, hard drive, and a camera, and set it all up to see how it worked. And honestly it was so much trouble to configure that I packed it up and sent it back. Plus I never could get the camera to connect to my wifi with the app...although I think I read somewhere that you need to do that first, before setting it up on the NVR...but still, this whole thing was a very complicated process. And the software! It is antiquated!!

I was really disappointed. I had too many things going on right now and just didn't need the added stress of hours of troubleshooting. I wanted the system to give me piece of mind, not add stress LOL. I haven't given up, I will try again when I have more time to beat my head against the wall. :-)

Rich, how happy are you with your Amcrest system? Does it work well with Alexa?