Reolink joins Works with Home Assistant; Is the recommendation against Reolink still valid?

[TRSx80]

When I first started with Frigate (which was not too long ago, mind you), I purchased the recommended camera (happily using the affiliate link), as I have been dorking around with hardware and software plenty long enough to know to heed well the recommendations of people more experienced in a particular area (in this case, IP cameras) than I am.

Not long after my purchase, I began to have sort of a nagging thought in the back of my mind that I may have spent too much money. 😟 It seems I keep seeing Reolink mentioned all the time by many people who seem to be using them just fine. Are they just lucky? I do know (from my experience in Armbian, for example) that instabilities and other issues can some times only be seen in a much larger sample size (e.g., what developers of Frigate, or Armbian might see) and that many users will never even hit any of those kind of issues, resulting in (some times wide) disparity between what the community and developers recommend.

So, I am no expert in IP cameras, to be sure. Just an interested user. So I can't help but wonder...

Are Reolink just considered kind of crappy and cheap (in general)? Or am I off base here? Maybe it's a case of rolling the dice(?). Spend less money and maybe you get lucky?

What prompted me to make this post today was the recent announcement that Reolink joins Works with Home Assistant program, and the resulting discussion at HA forums. In particular my post where I collect the relevant quotes/information, which seemed to indicate that (at least some of) the Reolink problems only apply to some older hardware, and have since been fixed in firmware.

But is that really true?

A quick search of the Discussions here for 'Reolink' seems to turn up quite a few results. I did not bother searching Issues as I would consider those invalid as the docs recommend against Reolink explicitly.

So I guess this is mainly what I am here to discuss. Is the (general) recommendation against Reolink still valid?

And then, indirectly, I suppose we can each determine whether we should begin to consider Reolink cameras, or continue to shy away from them.

I will also take this opportunity to thank everyone for their work, this is a really exciting project as it seems we are pursuing the state of the art here and it's lovely to have such Nice Things available to us mere mortals, especially under an F/LOSS license! 😄 ❤️ 🍻

[NickM-27]

There are many objective advantages that the recommended cameras have over reolink cameras:

• They have larger image sensors that the majority of reolink's cameras besides their CX line have, which means the camera will see better at night along with having better clarity during other times
• They have a much higher level of customizability in the firmware / behavior of the camera, you can customize everything from the lighting compensation (WDR, backlight, highlight, etc.) to the shutter speed. Reolink offers no such control on their cameras.
• A to-the-standard implementation of RTSP / ONVIF, and broad support for two way talk and other ONVIF features.

These types of things may not matter to some users and they still value saving money over the improved quality of the camera and software tune-ability. In which case there are some issues still:

• Their RTSP implementation is "standard" vs reolink's which often has bugs. This seems to be a YMMV situation where for given cameras some users have no issues while other users run into issues. I used to have an all reolink setup, and have since moved entirely away from reolink cameras. During this time I have talked to reolink support many times and even worked with their engineers, sending wireshark tcp dumps and stream capture to diagnose problems, but they were unable to solve my particular RTSP instability issue.

Reolink cameras with 5MP resolution or less tend to work quite well for the majority of users, while their higher resolution cameras that are h265 only are much more likely to cause issues.

[TRSx80]

Thanks for sharing your (valuable!) insights in more detail. It sort of confirms what I was beginning to suspect, whilst adding some additional context.

I now feel much better armed to make an informed purchasing decision, and hopefully we have helped others to do the same. 🍻

[RutgerDiehard]

I have spent months battling with Reolink cameras (older 5MP models, newer RLC-811A and the latest CX810) and all of them exhibited instabilities to the extent I couldn't achieve anything longer than several days with clean Frigate logs. I even used Neolink which takes a native Reolink camera feed and outputs a stable RTSP stream. While this helped tremendously, Neolink has issues of its own.

I replaced one of the Reolink cameras with an £50 Annke 8MP (a rebranded Hikvision) from Amazon and removed all others from Frigate. It was rock solid, so I've replaced the rest with more of the Annke 8MP, a Hikvision 8MP turret and 8MP Hikvision bullet. Frigate now runs 9 8MP cameras on a Dell Optiplex i5 with 32GB RAM on Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS. It's been up for weeks with completely clean logs. I use a Coral TPU for object detection and Home Assistant uses the feeds for dashboards.

I have spent countless hours changing Frigate configurations in the hope of stability with Reolink cameras - even to the point of blaming Frigate. But now, having replaced all Reolink cameras, I can honestly say avoid Reolink at all costs. They may have attractive pricing, regular offers on Amazon and have good reviews, but if you want to do anything other than plug them into a Reolink NVR, avoid at all costs.

[TRSx80]

Thanks for sharing your experience!

It reminded me of all the many hours I spent tweaking and testing cheap Zigbee Tuya mmWave sensors, only to install Aqara FP1E and then it "just worked" (with no configuration whatsoever). 🙄

I am about as cheap as they come but the older I get some times it's just worth spending the money and getting on with your life. 😆

Cheers!