dvsdave: And the good tips keep coming, thanks, yes the three cables off the reolink look annoying to deal with/hide away. Having one via poe would be easiest.
I also support the "don't buy Arlo", I also have the 4k cameras, had them for well over a year. They're all hooked up to the Arlo solar (best thing about them TBH). Their usefulness ends when the free 12 month period expired. I have a pixel phone, despite hooking up to my ubiqiti Teleport VPN I cannot get remote access to the recordings, so you don't have access to them if you don't pay their subscription. Interestingly the cheapest Arlo's come with free cloud access to recordings, but the expensive ones don't.
Accessing any camera's online in an exercise in frustration. They are so slow by the time 30 seconds of waiting to see what the alert was, it's over. They often force you to relogin (as you've logged in somewhere else?). The app is crap, you can't show a still from the camera in landscape and as I said it's achingly slow, even when I'm sitting 1 metre away from the base station on the LAN.
And as I said before, there's no access to recordings other than stumping up for cloud access to see them if you have an android phone. iPhones appear to work fine, always have. Arlo say they've been fixing it for Android forever and simply haven't. I'd throw these in the rubbish if I can stomach making a move, at some point I will. Not recommended.
I have some Dahua PoE cameras which i have no issues with at all. But I'm mainly posting to suggest having a look at NX Witness for the VMS side if things. It's very good software, but not the cheapest. I have a 4 camera setup, and NX is licensed per camera with a "starter" license for up to 4 cameras being a somewhat affordable option (unfortunately the per camera licensing cost doubles after the first 4).
I use Raspberry Pis to run the software (but is most easily installed on Windows), and it has various options for failover and to backup & replicate storage of the archive etc. Also remote viewing without the need for UPnP or manual port forwarding.
Some interesting reading here. We're going through the new build phase and looking to so cameras as part of the networking set up. We were also leaning towards unifi, but it depends who you talk to as to the experience! I like how the are just plug and play with the rest of the unifi products, but as others have pointed out there may be better or same quality options for the same or cheaper price bracket.. so now I'm not sure!!!
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