Security camera - recommend one please

robinbanks said:

Ho hi, my IP cam shipping my house feeds to China "for my convenience" is not a beauty for me!
That's a lot of data for a company to offer to proxy just to make my life easy; something must make such a "too good to be true" deal worth it for them..

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I get your point BUT it's only while I am watching it on an external network AND TBH our lives are so mundane I can see no interest from anybody anyway lols. In any case it's either that or open up your router, go figure the bigger security risk!

I reviewed one of those 'home to China' cameras, and checking with Wireshark it was astonishing how much data was going back and forth to China. It wasn't just the pictures, it seemed the PC's CPU was actually doing something else for them.

As for 'opening up your router' it's only necessary to open a couple of ports and that can be done quite securely.

Sally2000 said:

I reviewed one of those 'home to China' cameras, and checking with Wireshark it was astonishing how much data was going back and forth to China. It wasn't just the pictures, it seemed the PC's CPU was actually doing something else for them.

As for 'opening up your router' it's only necessary to open a couple of ports and that can be done quite securely.

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I have to ask what PC ?
There is no PC involved here, I have also used Wireshark on them and they basically ping the server and that's it until you want to make a remote connection then they are given the connection data to the remote client from the server, after that video streaming starts completely bypassing there server (ie direct to the remote client). So I think there are many different schemes out there and it is not safe to label them all the same way, I investigated Reolink very carefully before deciding to use them and yes I have heard lurid stories of what some products may do but Reolink do not.

AndyPRK said:

I guess all I really want, is to look on my phone and see what’s going on live.
And maybe a movement alert

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Ideally you want something with storage, be it a SD card or a HDD, you will still be able to view live on your phone / tablet but you will have a recording to refer to later if required.

SandyLyon said:

Ideally you want something with storage, be it a SD card or a HDD.

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Or even better, one can opt in for cloud storage for CCTV. Google drive offers this.