cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39437325
with ethernet the live feed is perfectly fine, and there is no remote downloading, it’s all streamed over the ethernet to a central box which handles everything from there. You might need some decode/encode capabilities, but to my understanding a lot of cameras will run multiple hardware encodes straight from the sensor over to the network already. So you probably don’t need much.
personally i don’t have a cctv setup at the moment, so i can’t give any recommendations, but you’d be looking for POE capable cameras, and you’d need a POE enabled switch, and a computer connected to that switch in order to handle the incoming data, including software obviously. But it’s probably also dependent on the camera itself, nicer cameras are probably going to be more flexible.
there are plenty of decent videos about homelab based CCTV setups out there if you’re looking to dig into them a bit more.
