Blink works well without the subscription if you buy the parts.

It’s not the cheapest, but I have had very good luck with Synology. Works with almost every camera on the market, including everything that supports ONVIF or RTSP. Good client software for web, desktop, and mobile. Has tons of tweaks and features.

Got a bunch of IP2M-841W and zoneminder, was kind of a pain to setup but it’s working fine now. Zoneminder is virtualized on some cheapo hardware that was laying around.

I started with zoneminder. When it worked, it worked “OK”.

Getting AI-based object detection working in it, felt pretty hackish.

After it stopped working a few times, without notifications, I ended up picking up a blue iris license.

Blue Iris, itself, has been 100% rock solid. Its only disadvantage, it requires a windows device to run it on. (Although- there IS a docker container which emulates it using WINE). But- overall, it has every feature you could ever want in an NVR, and its reliability is hard to beat.

I run it on a 100$ optiplex with an i5-6500 and 8G of ram. There is a dedicated 8T HDD for long-term storage, and a cheap 500G “burner” NVMe for caching content, and batching to HDD.

I also, run Frigate. Its object detection is quite well, and REALLY FAST. (I want alerts BEFORE somebody is already knocking on my door). It does have a lot of NVR functionality, however, its not on the same level as blue iris. But- it does work extremely well for object detection.

Frigate is fantastic, easy to setup, very simple UI. And it makes use of 6th gen and up Intel HW acceleration for object detection and encoding, so it’s fast and very light on CPU usage.

For hardware Reolink is pretty decent for low cost, their 4k cameras run around $80-120 and as far as I know all support RTSP.

Loving Frigate. Really straightforward and powerful. I use a couple Amcrest IP5M-T1179EB-28MM, very happy with them too.

I built a box with a standard PC case and a xeon v2 wfor zoneminder, and just slapped a second hand hyper 212 evo on there

I would say go for a v4 over the v2 because the efficiency is much better. You will probably just want 1 core per camera + a few to account for OS + container overhead, so more cores + efficiency is better here

I have some crappy reolink cameras through a unmanaged POE switch, up to a managed switch (cheapo tp link gigabit) so the camera and NVR are on one VLAN. I set some firewall rules in my eouter (edgerouter x) to let me connect to the NVR but block the cameras. Not ideal, but it works.

Perhaps better would be to use a NIC and connect directly to the unmanaged switch so there’s no need to VLAN, but I’m not using this for anything crazy, and i can still get gigabit speeds to the NVR

Also using a used enterprise 6tb drive for storage. Works fine and has been going strong for a year. They’re a fraction of the cost of a new drive, and are usually pulled well before theyre ready to fail