[kn100]

You make a good point - but let's be careful to not confuse personal hackery with random internet connected shit you buy from the internet. In my ideal world, every IoT product would directly and clearly document it's hardware, along with allowing the user to replace the firmware with whatever they wanted, so users like me can opt out of the cloud driven solution.

The nice thing about a hack like this is you, the creator, have full control over exactly what is exposed or how. There's no cloud, no external control, no unwanted firmware updates, nothing. If everybody was willing and capable to engage with their hardware at this sort of a level, there wouldn't be this crisis of insanely insecure hardware being sold to uncaring consumers, imo!

[bombcar]

One thing I've learned when dealing with cheap PoE CTV cameras, is that there really are only a very few IoT chipsets for various things, everyone seems to be using the same ones (except for a subset of boutique ones reusing off-the-shelf more complicated ARM processors or Raspberry Pis or whatever).

I'd love to see that more standardized and things like OpenWRT for all sorts of IoT junk, giving back control. Opinionated things like Valetudo https://valetudo.cloud

[kn100]

Y'know what I'd love? For all IoT crap to feature a socketed ESP32 or whatever. The vendor can ship whatever garbage software they want to it, but maybe in the future when Wifi 2.4ghz does eventually die as an example, we could all just swap the controller chip with one that supports 5ghz wifi. This will never happen since the world prefers us to throw all that crap out to buy new crap, but it's nice to imagine!

[Frotag]

Any recommendations for ONVIF-compliant cameras for home use?

I've tried a handful of used hikvision / dahua in the ~100usd range but they don't play nice with anything other than the vendor's software. Like VLC / open source VMSs can't play the RTSP stream. And even then, its a crapshoot whether features like stream configuartion or PTZ work.

I know the ONVIF group publishes a list of verified-compliant models but it's been a pain trying to find one that's affordable and in stock.

I've heard from devs that work on this stuff that most of this pain stems from how loose the ONVIF spec is. Too many optional features (even per "profile"), too vague on requirements, leading to lots of vendor-specific metadata / camera quirks.

[netbioserror]

My comment is maybe too-indirectly implying that these skills end up getting applied in careers where surveillance is added on top of these sorts of connected processes. The hobby can be as benign as we like, but paychecks change what people are willing to tolerate...