Anyone have camera suggestions? I've got 2 spare raspi 5s that would probably be a good base.
ranger_danger•Jul 26, 2026
In my experience, budget USB cameras are not reliable as a long-term solution because they randomly stop working in different ways after days of use and must be power-cycled.
Instead I would suggest either a direct CSI connection or an external GigE camera.
dvno42•Jul 26, 2026
Old Axis cams show up on eBay. Those are pretty standards oriented and easy to work with. Most hanwah and some Samsung are fine too.
kotaKat•Jul 26, 2026
Arecont Vision cameras are fun too. Casino mode, anyone?
"This feature ensures continuous full-motion recording at 30 frames per second (fps) to comply with gaming industry regulations. Casino Mode guarantees that the frame rate will not dip below 30 fps by forcing automatic bit rate and exposure control to maintain specific predetermined settings."
I always wonder why author of such software will not add some screenshot or gif showing UI and how it does work? In features there is mention of web interface.
mattlondon•Jul 26, 2026
How does this handle motion detection? Anyone tried it?
I have a bunch of Nest cameras and some cheaper Tapo cameras.
The "motion detection" is night and day different. The Tapo does some basic frame-diffing and it's awful. Shadows? DING DING DiNG MOTION DETECTED! gust of wind made some blades of grass move? Motion! Spider? Motion motion motion! Turn down the sensitivity a notch or two and it won't notice a human walk across the frame 2 meters away. The Tapo ones claim to be smart but twigs and leaves still trigger pet/person/motion alerts. It makes them essentially useless.
The Nest cameras are so much better and their "human" detected is usually zero-false-negatives at the cost of one or two false-positives perhaps once every 3 or 4 months, and their app is superior (tapo one frequently needs to be false-killed to load clips). Yes I am aware that the nest ones are streaming back to google 24/7.
Tldr: naive frame-diffing sucks for this sort of thing if used outside. An open source implementation that has accurate and reliable "human detection" would be amazing. Doesn't need to be "AI" - I would hope that there is some sort of computationally reasonable OpenCV way of doing person detection. Perhaps wait for frame-diffing to flag motion then feed it to a more expensive algorithm?
genericacct•Jul 26, 2026
Try the motion Linux package, it can connect to tapos over SDP and then you can run Yolo or any other solution on the output
atmosx•Jul 26, 2026
Seriously… how hard is it to setup an RPi with a camera and offload the detection to some open source software? Last time I checked there projects performing animal, face and even license plates reckon, extraction and db recording of “who”, “when”, “what” using cheap cameras and an RPi.
Fabricio20•Jul 26, 2026
It's actually pretty darn easy nowadays and i'm so glad its the case! Frigate is amazing and the detection package is of your choosing (hardware dependant) and everything is customizable too.
drnick1•Jul 26, 2026
What is the difference between this and Frigate? Before clicking the link, I thought this would be a hardware solution (build you own camera from open components).
serf•Jul 26, 2026
`motion` is in the big hall of fame for 'software other things are based on' next to imagemagick and curl.
kube-system•Jul 26, 2026
My question about this project and the numerous similar projects: where do I get a usb camera suitable for this? Webcams typically have unsuitable enclosures, focus behavior, and low light performance.
7 Comments
Instead I would suggest either a direct CSI connection or an external GigE camera.
"This feature ensures continuous full-motion recording at 30 frames per second (fps) to comply with gaming industry regulations. Casino Mode guarantees that the frame rate will not dip below 30 fps by forcing automatic bit rate and exposure control to maintain specific predetermined settings."
[1] https://www.retailitinsights.com/doc/arecont-vision-adds-cas...
I have a bunch of Nest cameras and some cheaper Tapo cameras.
The "motion detection" is night and day different. The Tapo does some basic frame-diffing and it's awful. Shadows? DING DING DiNG MOTION DETECTED! gust of wind made some blades of grass move? Motion! Spider? Motion motion motion! Turn down the sensitivity a notch or two and it won't notice a human walk across the frame 2 meters away. The Tapo ones claim to be smart but twigs and leaves still trigger pet/person/motion alerts. It makes them essentially useless.
The Nest cameras are so much better and their "human" detected is usually zero-false-negatives at the cost of one or two false-positives perhaps once every 3 or 4 months, and their app is superior (tapo one frequently needs to be false-killed to load clips). Yes I am aware that the nest ones are streaming back to google 24/7.
Tldr: naive frame-diffing sucks for this sort of thing if used outside. An open source implementation that has accurate and reliable "human detection" would be amazing. Doesn't need to be "AI" - I would hope that there is some sort of computationally reasonable OpenCV way of doing person detection. Perhaps wait for frame-diffing to flag motion then feed it to a more expensive algorithm?