Blue Iris

Hey all!
I know you will think "oh no another post about what is the best camera" and no, it's not.
It's been two years now that i'm using a Reolink RCL-410 for outside, which is really good, and a Dafang (xiaomi) inside, hacked because i don't like/need cloud.

Now, since i need to change the inside one because it's not stable at all, i searched like i always did and i wonder why it's so difficult to find a good camera with solid materials, durable, onvif/dual rtsp AND ptz support in BI that does not communicate with external servers.
The best solution i found is another Reolink, the E1 pro, which is a little bit too expensive to me and i still don't understand if that one too established outgoing connections.
So another choice, maybe the more "private" one, seems another Xiaomi camera hacked, but i don't spot too much stability this way.

And you people, what do you use, suggest, think about it?
How much do you care that your camera has so much outgoing traffic?
Thanks in advance and happy Sunday

Well in short... I disable everything possible but still do not trust my cameras so they aren't allowed to go out, period. My cameras query DNS and NTP for their own good, but I keep that contained to my own network. But yes, it's very very common for cameras (especially cheaper ones) to have this cloud 'ability' to make it easier for users with low technical knowledge that want it to just work. I would not recommend any setup where the cameras were capable of getting to the internet (especially since you mentioned this is for an indoor camera!!). There are multiple ways to go about it, but thats the bottom line in my opinion.

As for my own experiences with my cameras.... my Amcrest cameras are running the latest firmware and I've disabled every option possible in the GUI but they continuously try to reach the cloud. I've contacted Amcrest support and reviewed their forum and basically the response is - tough @$*!. They claim it wants to contact the cloud to tell it that it has been configured to not use the cloud and then it will stop - which makes less than zero sense - but in any event, I allowed it out to test and it did not stop, so I just deal it. My SV3C cameras with the latest firmware do NOT reach out if you disable the cloud settings... by default it's on, but they do stop if you tell them to.

Overall the two camera types are nearly identical, build quality very similar and the GUI is close - but not exactly the same (I actually like the SV3C a little better). Hope that helps in your search!