Avoid anything that requires its own app, Internet access, or mentions "cloud" in any way. AFAIK plain old "dumb" IP cameras with widely compatible HTTP/RTSP streams are still available.
Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676 , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.
Fwiw I don't use the app, but I have a Yi 4k camera, which I bought used as a cheap GoPro alternative, and it's surprisingly easy to hack some stuff with.
It has a WiFi connection feature which is primarily meant for use with their app (which is kind of garbage), but it's a Linux system and I can telnet into it with root privileges and mess around with the filesystem. It has an rtsp stream, a fairly ok remote control API with some community libraries in github, and even has Python (2.7, at least until I take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a more recent version, but still).
Just this week I was playing with building a script to hook up the rtsp stream to my PC so I could use an AI model to do bird classification and set it up next to my bird feeder.
It's not advertised as being hacker friendly and I imagine this openness is more due to a lack of the zealousness and resources that more expensive products seem to insist on dedicating to locking everything down, but it's been really fun and I'd definitely get a couple more cheap ones, given the opportunity. No idea what the situation is on their other products though, and it does suck that non-technical users are stuck with an app with ads.
Comments
Avoid anything that requires its own app, Internet access, or mentions "cloud" in any way. AFAIK plain old "dumb" IP cameras with widely compatible HTTP/RTSP streams are still available.
Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676 , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.
Fwiw I don't use the app, but I have a Yi 4k camera, which I bought used as a cheap GoPro alternative, and it's surprisingly easy to hack some stuff with.
It has a WiFi connection feature which is primarily meant for use with their app (which is kind of garbage), but it's a Linux system and I can telnet into it with root privileges and mess around with the filesystem. It has an rtsp stream, a fairly ok remote control API with some community libraries in github, and even has Python (2.7, at least until I take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a more recent version, but still).
Just this week I was playing with building a script to hook up the rtsp stream to my PC so I could use an AI model to do bird classification and set it up next to my bird feeder.
It's not advertised as being hacker friendly and I imagine this openness is more due to a lack of the zealousness and resources that more expensive products seem to insist on dedicating to locking everything down, but it's been really fun and I'd definitely get a couple more cheap ones, given the opportunity. No idea what the situation is on their other products though, and it does suck that non-technical users are stuck with an app with ads.