I live in an apartment, had someone take 2 Grainger boxes once. Looking for some recs or testimonials about these ring doorbell cameras and the like.

1/25/2025 10:54:14 PM

it was probably Phill

but Ring is pretty reliable

1/25/2025 10:56:55 PM

Lol. I am seeing things about a subscription? Perhaps this is a little different than I thought...doesn't the video files save on my PC?

Thinking a peephole camera would be more discreet and less problematic with apartment office ppl, ring makes one of the.

[Edited on January 25, 2025 at 11:30 PM. Reason : 2 other common companies are wyze and eufy]

1/25/2025 11:29:06 PM

With ring, no subscription, you can see through the doorbell camera with the app. You can talk through it as well. With the subscription, it saves your videos, which you can download if need be.

1/26/2025 11:52:35 AM

It saves them directly to the CCP servers.

1/26/2025 7:36:59 PM

^^not possible to save videos without subscription? I only ask cause being able to see/talk in real time seems nice, but what if a few days pass and you realize you need to review something? Just SOL?

1/26/2025 8:14:12 PM

$60/year subscription. Or you can use a screen recording app on your phone but you have to manually be watching I guess.

Or try another brand like eufy/reolink/unifi which apparently don't require subscriptions, per reddit.

Or just tell Phill to stop stealing your MAGA shoes Grainger boxes

1/26/2025 10:57:37 PM

"Local storage" i think are the keywords for what I am looking for

1/27/2025 11:55:29 PM

Set them up and then beat the crap out of them

1/28/2025 11:53:09 PM

eufy stuff lets you record locally to an SD card or to a hard drive and has no subscription. There are much more involved solutions that have no subscription and everything is local like unifi. I prefer the latter

1/29/2025 11:00:47 AM

Thanks. Now reversibility and removability are key. Reversible for if/when i move from my apartment, removable so like some jerk neighbor can't yank the shit off the door.

1/29/2025 8:51:20 PM

check out Blue Iris and use whatever cheap chinese wifi cameras you want

I suggest putting them on a vLAN or some kind of IoT network that's separate from the rest of your network

https://blueirissoftware.com/

2/1/2025 12:01:52 PM

There is a slickdeal for a blink camera and some sync 2 thing that allows for local storage, got that. For 28, won't be bummed if it sucks

2/2/2025 11:32:16 PM