[kwlug-disc] Home assistant: privacy-preserving doorbells

[Jason]

I had considered UniFi cameras but went with Amcrest for a few reasons:

The UniFi cameras were significantly more expensive for the same level of
video quality and weatherproofing I wanted.  I have 3 Amcrest 4K POE
cameras outside for years and have had no issues.

Also, I don't believe you can access the RTSP stream of the camera directly
- you have to go through the proprietary UniFi Protect NVR.  Can you
confirm if this has changed? If you have too many RTSP streams enabled, it
will crash the NVR:

https://community.ui.com/questions/Access-UniFi-Protect-camera-RTSP-stream/b1ba4c62-0764-4223-80d0-650768b0f87f#answer/5750343e-e45e-4069-a1ea-b4f86f80adcb

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnifiProtect/s/vo18ca6iP4

Also, I did hear that UniFi will support third party cameras via RTSP,
however their own camera line are proprietary and cannot be used with 3rd
party or self hosted NVR easily. Looks like G4 and G5 cameras over a
certain version won't work without UniFi Protect NVR:

https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/camera_specific/#unifi-protect-cameras


Basically, if you're buying UniFi Protect you're buying into their
ecosystem so you may as well go all in or not at all. Choose wisely.

Jason


On Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:40 PM <peter_melse at gto.net> wrote:

> Ubiquiti has some options as well, wifi or poe. that support rtsps
>
> I'm also in the "vlan everything off with outbound traffic restricted to
> the local DVR only" camp.
>
> ~Peter
>
> On 2026-01-28 12:57, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
>
> Somebody (whom I won't name, but who I think is on this list) was
> wondering whether anybody here uses a privacy-preserving video
> doorbell as an alternative to Ring. Apparently Amazon shares video
> footage from Ring doorbells with law enforcement or ICE or something,
> and that makes people unhappy.
>
> I don't think we have covered this topic explicitly in a KWLUG
> meeting, but I could be wrong. Does anybody know?
>
> Even if we have not covered it, do people have suggestions? I know
> there are some doorbells that save to SD cards and not the cloud. I
> guess the goal would be to have control over the video so it does not
> touch a cloud server that could be redistributed to ICE.
>
> - Paul
>
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