Installing Cameras and Building an NVR
4-26-2026
Spent the weekend building an NVR and installing cameras at my parents’ house. The best part is that, aside from the software on the cameras themselves, I accomplished this using entirely open source software.
The cameras we used (Amcrest ProHD turret style) have an RTSP stream, and you can access it with basically any software that supports it. Obviously, the first step was installing the cameras and running cabling to them. We went through the attic, and my dad, being the smaller one between the two of us, had to crawl through hell running the cables, but we got it done.
After that, we swapped out the old switch that had been powering four WiFi access points over PoE and replaced it with a fresh 8-port PoE switch, then hooked up the cameras. This worked out great because we didn’t need to run separate power to the cameras or the access points throughout the house. It's a little messy at this time, but we'll eventually make it look much neater and clean up the cable organization.
I picked up a used Dell OptiPlex on eBay to use as the NVR and threw in a cheap 500 GB hard drive for now. It should hold about seven days of footage, but I’ll upgrade that later. I installed Debian 13 and used Docker Compose to spin up a Frigate instance. Then I painstakingly configured it to pull in the camera feeds over RTSP.
Overall, it was a successful project. It’s not the first time I’ve done something like this, but I’m still proud I pulled it off.