Best Practices for Video Monitoring

As a new hubitat elevation C-8 owner I have a few questions that I'm hoping to get pointed to the right resources. This is question 3 of 3:

I want to add video camera feeds to my HE. I had (past tense) a 6-camera Hikvision NVR that was still in the box that was stolen from a remote site (I was still installing POE cabling)! Before replacing it, I'm wondering what is the best advice surrounding cameras and nvrs. Happy to see that Hikvision cameras show up in the Hubitat support pages here, and video feeds showing up on HE dashboards. So should I add my replacement cameras to the hubitat and skip the NVR, or can I add the entire Hikvision NVR which has the cameras attached to the HE? Can a hubitat enable or coexist with camera recording for evidence purposes? Any information around this would be awesome

@BullValley So if just doing feeds with not using the Hikvision NVR you just need the proper http url to put in an image tile and set for 1 second refresh.

If you are looking to use the Hikvision NVR that will be problematic because it creates it's own network.

Your next option is to use Camect (which is awesome) where you can both feed the control panels in hubitat and have an NVR. This will also make each cam a motion sensor.

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I use a Dahua NVR and cameras for my video security. I've had it running for many years now, and I am very happy with an NVR system. I'm not sure about adding cameras directly to HE and dashboards. I use HD+ to monitor my video feeds on dashboards created within HD+. I use Amazon Fire HD pads all over my house for that, and it works perfectly. I am also not sure about storing video with HE. I would encourage you to use an NVR for video storage. I have provided security camera video to my HOA many times. Just my 2 cents...

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merge your video into your dashboard ala HD+. simple, elegant, works. I used to play with a BlueIris integration - but have moved away from HE being the center point of my world.
My opinion is things work together, no one thing in control. Dashboard, graphing, data logging, external connectivity (lan and wan), Auto, Security - the old 'roll it up into one place' doesn't hold up well and eggs in one basket gets easily upset. I've got icons on nas drives. dashboards in windows, (and android) security with dahua, alexa for voice, google for family / friends integration, Influxdb and graphana for making graphs - come to the dark side...
and pushing vid streams is bandwidth consuming - HE is 100Mb ... theres that too...

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