For those with a relatively simple home CCTV setup?

JustAnotherSaver

Frozen_up_north said:

Motion detection, or at least on my Swann system, works very well. In fact too well at times as it picks up rain/fog, shadows, birds flying, insects at night, etc. There are Swann cameras that work on infra red movement that may be less prone to false triggering, although I am not sure of how far away the movement will be detected.

The problem with continuous recording is that realistically you aren't going to trawl through hours of "nothing happening" to see if you had someone snooping around. Whereas with motion detection, it is fairly quick and easy to see if there has been any activity.

Fair point.

Although i don't think there's too much 'trawling'. It's a stationary picture. My car ends up damaged or the fence ends up broken or as has happened recently, something happens to the drive. I select a file - as it was. Skip forward a few hours and select another file - as it was. Select another file at random - that fence panel now looks broken, the cars wing mirror has been broken off etc so now i know it's between that clip and that clip.

Would much rather an overly sensitive motion detector than a sleepy one though.

a

JustAnotherSaver, what you want is a camera or system that has AI. Admittedly the cameras cost more, and this company https://smartsentry.ai/#products sells it products to third parties, and here is another https://ai-homeguard.com/

I have too been alerted and woken up by rain, snow, clouds, sunlight reflections, car lights, vehicles with flashing lights, paper blowing in the wind, cats, dogs, postmen, bin men, leaflet scum (even when they you ask politely, they still do it). came to a conclusion that you want a small spot to focus, effectively a tripwire, on that object either put a mat black or white object - I used mat grey and mat black duct  tape. It triggered multiple times a day at all hours, and sensitivity setting did not cure it

Want to splosh the dosh? https://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/PoE-Starlight-4K-IP-PTZ-camera_60722093639.html
This video has been use for this x20@12mp camera, but others with x40@2mp cameras are also using it 
https://cloud.video.alibaba.com/play/u/2153292369/p/1/e/6/t/1/d/hd/62758233.mp4

Working_in_pyjamas

bengalknights said:

A cheap YI Cam from Amazon should suffice

I'd second this, the Yi outdoor camera is £40 on Amazon now (there's a £10 off offer on it at the moment making it £39.99, the price fluctuates but it always seems to be a lightning deal).

Yi IS cloud based but you don't have to use the cloud, you get 6 second motion detected clips in the cloud (for free) and can have free notifications of these - however you can also put a 64GB micro SD card and it will record 24/7 - only about 5 days worth but for £40 you can't compain, you could pay for the cloud if you wanted longer storage.

You don't have to get up on a ladder to take the card out to view the footage, you can view it on the app on your phone or on a downloaded app on a computer.

It's quite a big cable as it has a USB on the end (just plugs into a regular USB plug socket, like a phone charger) but you can easily drill through the top corner of UPVC frames. I filled with a bit of blu-tac and white electrical tape over the top and it's barely noticeable. It has night vision, motion detection (if wanted, you can turn it off) and is very easy to set up. The camera will be up and running within 2 minutes using the app.

ifstar

Tried posting twice but doesn't seem to be saving and displaying for some reason.

The zosi one I've got has a 3tb drive and is about 30 days storage for 4 cameras.  You can mark off areas on each camera where you want it to trigger motion detection.  It puts a mark on the screen when it triggers so very easy to find. 

olbas_oil

I went for a pair of Yi 1080p wi-fi cams (Currently £49 but were £35 last month). They do use the Yi app, and connect to China etc, but it is fairly easy to put the yi-hack software on instead, to make them local. Then you can look at them in a browser on your local network, and set them up to save footage to the SD card. They power via USB so a small hole (or battery pack might work for a few hours). They have their own motion detection, but I tend to have always-on record, and I only check when I find something wrong. (I don't want alerts whenever the postman comes, or the sun comes out!)
That might be enough for your purposes. It does get a bit more technical, because I also have a server running Zoneminder which uses the feeds to run motion detection, and do its own recording on motion events. That can be accessed from anywhere using the app ZMNinja.