Arlo EOL announcement for "older" cameras

This again, sadly speaks for localized autonomous devices and integrations :slightly_frowning_face:

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Here! Here! Totally agree. I'm a very dissatisfied Arlo customer.

Any system recommendations? I like battery-powered cameras (with long-life, of course) and I'm interested in Frigate/Coral (which integrate into Home Assistant). Would want to feed snapshots into HE dashboards.

My other concern is local storage: cost and bandwidth. I started looking at Synology NAS options late last night, but these are expensive. Opens up lots of other options, though...

Thanks!

Personally i use Netatmo devices that store locally and are able to integrate to HA. Havent checked HE integration yet.

Cool, thank you. It looks like these store data on an SD card. Do you know if they are replaceable?

How does the object/facial recognition work for you?

:grinning:

The SD card is user reachable and exchangable yes.

Actually i have them primarily on my HomeKit where the recklgnistion works fine.
Havent checked that on HA yet

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I've been unhappy with Arlo for a while and have been planning a migration to PoE cameras. I've been looking at Amcrest NVRs and cameras but also at camect. The camect stuff appears to be really nice but the 24mb stream max is a bummer. I may end up sending a high res stream to an Amcrest NVR and a low res stream to camect. Camtect has some nice AI and @brianwilson has an integration for it. I just ordered a camera and the camect to play with it before I take the plunge.

My goal is to use the cameras to detect people outside and trigger security lights instead of using regular motion sensors. I can actually do this with Arlo but it's buggy at best and requires multiple clouds. Would like to keep it all local.

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Hi @H_Local

Many thanks. I assume I would need a Homekit hub. I do use an iPhone.

@brad5: Thank you! Good to have options. Do let us know what you learn!

@moh uses the camect integration I think... he may be able to provide better insight. And of course Brian Wilson uses it as well, I assume!

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@Doug_Phoenix correct, you would need an Apple Tv4K (not all that expensive) or Apple Homepod. They offer more functionailty than just the HomeKit hub as they serve as entertainment devices for music / video as well while hosting HomeKit in the background.

With HA and HE serving devices to HomeKit that are not nativly supported i have quite a usefull, intuitive home automation system that even the wife understands and appreciates.

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@brad5 i would suggest to look into Homekit Secure video supported cams… the Netatmo Welcome and Presence provide both local as Homekit Secure Video support

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Thank you! You just reminded me to follow the three rules for a happy life:

  1. Keep the wife happy.
  2. Have fun, when you can.
  3. Never, ever forget rule 1.

:wink:

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Since @brad5 mentioned me to @Doug_Phoenix I thought I would chime in to @brad5 s experiment using a “not so smart” NVR (Amcrest) as a high res NVR to get around the 24MB limitation of the Camect “smart” NVR/hub. This is exactly the approach I have been using for the past two years and because of the excellent integration with Hubitat (many thanks to @brianwilson), I have been able to use Camect’s excellent object recognition to act as a trigger for various RM rules (motion lighting, mail and package delivery notifications, wild animal warnings, perimeter property intrusions by “persons” as opposed to just any motion, front door/porch and driveway notifications etc).

There is quite a bit of information available in this community if you search for “Camect”. In addition, if you want specific examples of some of my use cases and implementation, rather than wading through all the Camect topics, you can further filter your “Camect” search with the advanced search options to filter for user “moh”. I am certainly no expert on Camect or its integration with Hubitat (@brianwilson the developer of the integration is the true guru for this), but given all the help this community has given me over the last couple of years, I wanted to “give back” to the community by describing my own learning process and how I learned to integrate Camect with Hubitat, as well as how I integrated announcements, notifications and TTS of my Camect/Hubitat system (in my case with Alexa devices via Echo Speaks or virtual switches). Thus my multiple posts on this topic.

The 24MB limit may be a roadblock for some, but one that can be sidestepped somewhat in the manner that @brad5 suggested. Also, in my dealings with the Camect staff (they maintain an excellent Google forum and are extremely responsive), they are willing to discuss with individuals (it is not available for the general market at this time), units with higher streaming limits (although at significantly higher prices of course which they offered to me).

Again, I am by no means an expert on these things, just a hobbyist who kind of figured things out for myself with the help of this community (at least for my use case). I also have no experience whatsoever with battery powered cameras nor wifi cameras, as all of my cameras are relatively entry level to low/mid priced wired Amcrest 4k IP cameras, connected to Camect and a relatively inexpensive Amcrest 4k NVR. What ever cameras/system you decide to go with, make sure that your cameras can simultaneously stream at the resolution or resolution(s) you want. Again, I am not familiar with battery powered wifi cameras, but I suspect simultaneous streams from a given camera at different resolutions might be a limitation inherent to a given camera (some of my older wired Amcrest cameras allowed a choice of three different streams, while some of my newer ones only allowed two different streams). Also some cameras may allow multiple simultaneous streaming, but the lower res stream may not be as high as you might wish. I have all my cameras streaming to my NVR at maximum resolution, but have most of my cameras simultaneously streaming to my Camect at 1080P (2MP) with only a couple of “critical” cameras streaming to my Camect at 4k (8MP) and 5MP.

Anyway, good luck and Happy New Year to both @brad5 and @Doug_Phoenix and, as always, many thanks to @brianwilson for all his great work! Hope this info helps.

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Fantastic, @moh

I'll be sure to dive into the forums. I'm just a hobbyist too!

This is a really shady move by Arlo and is simply a cash grab. They haven't converted enough users to their paid subscription so they are just pushing along what would already happen with attrition if they just left things alone. It is going to push some paying customers away though to. I have 2 Arlo pro2's and 2 ArloQ cameras that will be impacted next year. I also have a Arlo Video Doorbell and Arlo Pro 3 that isn't, but I am not going to simply wait around to find out what tricks they are going to through at me later with them. I am now looking at alternatives like Reolink with a NVR as well.

What are the good non cloud dependent Video Doorbell options now.

Totally. Though I actually already have a subscription and was getting ready to get off them anyway, this cements my decision. And I could do without the three extra wifi networks their hubs generate.

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I noticed this on the Netatmo site.

So is it or isn't it dependent on the cloud?

@jameslslate

Both.

There is a physical SD card in the device storing your images. However to acces the device through an integration or the app you need internet access (which is free of charge for years now)

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I am beyond angry at Arlo and others: Last month Amazon killed cloud-cam so video clips of garage deliveries were killed with it. Wyze killed their free cloud clips last year.

All of these companies offered their paid services to restore what I had paid for in the sales price. These services weren't "free". I would NOT have purchased any of these had I know that the cloud services would be canceled so quickly.

It may be overkill for you but I'm using Blue Iris NVR software with multiple PoE cameras. Blue Iris sends HTTP commands to my Hubitat hub when it confirms a person has been detected by a camera. In response, my hub turns on lights, sirens and changes the color of my outdoor security lighting. Going the other way, Hubitat sends commands to Blue Iris when doors or gates are opened and Blue Iris sends me a text and PTZ's my cameras so they're zoomed in on the door that was opened.