Home brewed IP camera/NVR system - advice needed

[Hill-Billy 0]

Hi all,

 

First post, so bear with me...

I'm looking to build an IP camera system at my house, ideally "re-using" as much gear as I can.

The thinking was as follows"

1) Lay out where I want the cameras around the house. Get a sparky to run Cat6 cabling to those locations (terminating in one room in the house).

2) Procure and install decent IP cameras*, terminate in the one room where the cables are.

3) Connect the cameras to a VLAN on a POE switch (already have)

4) Run those cameras from a PC-based NVR (already have a couple of spare PCs I can provision for the task/upgrade as required).

5) Depending on storage requirements, "hive off" video files to a dedicated NAS which I also have.

 

I'm thinking between 6-8 cameras, but I guess that will depend on what the system can handle, as regards Definition/frame rates etc. which is where I get a bit lost.

 

So many of the "off-the-shelf" cameras are very much geared to Cloud storage (no interest in that).

What I'm looking for is quality cameras, and quality. complementary software which will run them (so something reasonably "open standard" on both camera and software, if possible), that re-uses gear I already have lying around.

I'm happy enough to set up  the networking/VLAN stuff, as well as required port-forwarding for remote viewing etc. Naturally, I'll be blocking outbound Internet access to prevent the cameras from phoning home etc.

- PCs** are 6th Gen i5 boxes. I can add whatever memory is required, extra NICs and SSDs.

- The NAS I would be using would be an old HP N36L Microserver with probably 11Tb useable storage.

So, is there a mix and match of decent, POE-capable IP cameras and x86-64 software which will run them?

 

** I have two identical boxes; one would be setup and configured to run the camera network, and it's HDD would then be cloned to the other box, to be put aside as a cold spare.