Currently have a Ring Doorbell cam, and want to add a couple other cameras in and out of the house. I’ve heard there are some compatible with iCloud now, and like the idea of privacy for storage and avoiding the monthly fee. Are there any recommended brands or models to start looking at? Any tips or advice? Can’t run wires, so wireless and battery powered options are ideal. TIA
HomeKit camera expert here. Matter 1.5 just announced camera support, but don’t expect anything soon from Apple as it only supports Matter 1.2 even now.
There are rumors Apple is working on a security camera, so this may play into the Matter 1.5 standard.
That said, if you want the BEST HomeKit camera right now it’s the Tapo C125 (not to be confused with the C120). You can use your iCloud+ plan (200GB gives you 5 cameras recording, 2TB plan gives you unlimited).
It’s not wireless though so you’re SOL on that one.
I"m looking to come out of the Ring ecosystem now and try to leverage a wireless system, recording directly to my NAS so I’m going to be watching this thread for recommendations too.
Take a look at eufy’s cameras. While I don’t have them in Apple HomeKit, I do have them recording to a NAS, solar powered, and wireless.
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switched completely to amazon’s ring after starting with nest. ring is much more fluid and easy to manage in addition to feature parity or better than google’s nest. works well with alexa too and now with alexa+ on the verge it should get better.
Another option would be to integrate your Ring cameras into HomeKit. This doesn’t require a great deal of skill, nor any cost at all.
The free version of https://www.scrypted.app does the job very well for me, you can pay for it to get a full NFR solution that is stand-alone and will integrate most cameras.
Granted this needs to run on something, but as long as you have some kind of compute that runs 24x7 you should be fine.
Else I’ve had good success with the Eufy and Logitech Circle devices directly into HomeKit.
(I’m happy to answer any questions if you have them, I’ve had Scrypted running about 9 months, and haven’t had to touch it once)
PS - To answer your question, if I started from a clean slate, and had Power or Ethernet (PoE) to the places I needed cameras, I’d go with Unifi. HomeKit is good for snapshots and alerts, just not 24x7 NVR.
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