Hey burns.If your going to upgrade your camera system, you might as well go with the shit that the CCP use to track everyone, Dahua or Hikvision. Most of the really bad shit is going to happen at night, so you should choose a security camera based on night performance; which is the most difficult to get right. If you have an old computer sitting around (to use as a dedicated box) you can run all your security though a software called BlueIris; which is suppose to be amazing.
There is a bit more setting up required. You should isolate your camera system on its on LAN or VLAN, which have their own rules on what can connect to it. When looking at them remotely, you should have a VPN set up on your network (or Gateway), to dial into your system directly. If going the more robust BlueIris server, you will need to set that up too. The cameras all seem to be PoE though, so only running one CaT6 is nice.
I went with the cheep route, for a first set up, of 2 Dahua Starlight line of cameras (a 1080 and a 1440 @ ~$130 each) and a Dahua DVR with WD Purple HDD (~$200). I set up my TP-Link PoE switch on the UniFi gateway's LAN2 port, and isolated it from the internet and other networks in the firewall.
After reading some more, I kinda wish I spent a couple hundred more and got a machine to run dedicated BlueIris on (like a midlevel Intel NUC - maybe), as it might be easier to use, after the initial hiccup of learning how to set it up.
Links:
IPCamTalk forum, direct link to cameras:
IPCamTalk direct link to Wiki:
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Scanning through the stuff you linked. Any idea if you can add motion alerts to any of this ip software? Even better - I'd love to run it to a private server and make a web app so myself and others can access it. Any insights?