for about 70$ i got 4 cameras and 3 adhesive mounts shipped the same day, lemme dig up a link: https://amzn.to/4lntzZG this is the tp link tapo security camera. anyways, i woke up today and it was infront of my house, and setting it up was a breeze.

i connected the cameras one by one, heres how its setup: you may or may not need a smart home hub but yeah, not sure on this one since i have a 20$ hub from i think aqara, but heres what i did after my hub was setup: i plugged in my camearas after i mounted them, selected their ip on the tapo app on my iphone, it connected, and i turned on remote camera, which i dont think is connected to the cloud. after it connected over 2.4ghz wifi i was able to access it over my lan, and stream via vlc. theres a mandatory username/password security scheme, and vlc was completely able to authencate and stream

the stream is reliable as its connection, and the video just now got hacked now by some bay area security team (long story some kid i went to middle school works at kron4 and yeah, wants me dead for some strangle reason), but as long as the device is connected you can stream via vlc without major freeze ups, crashed, major video issues, etc, i believe theres a speaker there so you can talk to the people, maybe even use it to function as a two way communication device

the streams use rtsp, which i believe is an open standard and yes c/c++ libraries are out there to connect and stream video and audio from the device.

vlc video streaming may or may not be available on all smarthome cameras, but the tp-link supports it flawlessly

the app itself handles remote viewing and management fine, but if you're looking for a web based interface, which i believe is called something like cloud hosting, where most if not all data is hosted on the cloud (a conglomerate of servers), including downloaded data

so if you want to view your camera stream from outside your smart home, you're basically limited to the apps, unless you use something like google home, which can get pricey (upwards of 500$ opposed to 300$ for the aqara/tapo set). but if you want to use aqara/tapo devices, you'll have to use their official app. all routing to devices is hadnled through the cloud i think, i honestly havent tried, one sec lemme fire up lte and see what happens)

yup, after i disabled wifi and enabled lte, i was able to login to the aquara and tapo app. so if you want remote access youre basically limited to proprietary methods of connection, unless theres a cloud feature im not aware of, but yeah, i just used the apps

im pretty sure these are home kit enabled, so if you want to use a native app for macos called the home app, labeled home on macos and ios+ devices, you can manage and view smarthome devices on an app for apple devices

freebsd should support both web and vlc streaming, along with most major unices and unix clones if posix compliant

well, thats it for now, fucking, hacked hte firmware on my smart devices, fucking, thats why we had a dubya dubya two
unidef