I am looking into updating and upgrading my home security system and integrating it into Home Assistant. I currently have amcrest cameras and amcrest NVRs and they work just dine at recording and playback. I’ve been wanting a better motion detection option that doesnt include cloud services and subscriptions. I found Frigate, the open source nvr software that seems to have really good ai capabilities that run locally!

My question is this, should I swap my equipment over to reolink? Or should I go through the effort of Frigate?

I’m not familiar with how well either one works. Amcrest has motion detection but I can’t get any push notifications to work, so I have to manually check the recording for “motion” in the recording and at night its just bugs or leaves. During the day its mostly leaves.

If i set up frigate I would only use it for the ai and use home assistant to give me push notifications, and leave the nvrs to record. All of my cameras are poe and soon im setting up separate vlans to keep all the networks separate.

Ideally using home assistant for push notifications allows me to control when I get a notification. I dont want notifications from all cameras if the alarm is off, but I do when the driveway camera sees something. And with extra automations I can tell it to ignore it when im using the driveway etc.

Now reolink is compatible with HA, but to what extent? I’ve read that it doesn’t offer as many features as I might need.

I’m just very unsure about all of this 😕