The next step in my HA journey is adding cameras; indoor, outdoor, and doorbell so I’ve been exploring my options. I had originally intended to do a Frigate setup, I even have a Coral module and PC to do it with, but then I discovered Reolink.
Without having any experience with them they look nearly ideal. They seem to have tight integration with HA 2023.3 or later and their pricing and functionality look good.
They seem like a no brainer but I’ve noticed that they’re often NOT the first recommendation in the HA Community. Why is that and why shouldn’t I use them?
The RTSP streams on most older units is really unstable (feeds freeze/stopworking etc) and makes it hard to use in frigate / Blueiris / Even Synology surveillance station… SOME of the brand new ones are OK but it is really hard to tell as Reolink frequently sells the same “Model” but with completely different hardware revisions and DIFFERENT firmware available per revision.
If you stick with the native reolink HW / Apps / NVRs they are a great value. Lots of bang for the buck.
If you want to use cameras with frigate, look at the frigate and go2rtc projects recommended cameras / forums / git repos for info on models that are known to work.