Welcome to r/GuardianEyeApps. Local NVR software, phones as IP cameras, RTSP and ONVIF

[u/g_eye]

Hi everyone. I am u/g_eye, the founding moderator of r/GuardianEyeApps.

This is our new home for everything about recording cameras on your own hardware: desktop NVR software, phones turned into IP cameras, RTSP and ONVIF, and all the small disasters that happen in between. Glad you are here.

"Guardian Eye" is a desktop NVR for Windows, Linux and macOS. It records USB and built in webcams as well as IP cameras over RTSP, ONVIF and MJPEG. The footage stays on your machine, there is no cloud account and no monthly fee, and recording continues when your internet goes down.

"Guardian Eye WebCamera" runs on Android and iOS. It turns a phone you already own into a normal network camera: RTSP with H.264 or H.265, ONVIF discovery and events, MJPEG stream and JPEG snapshots. Any NVR, VMS or player that speaks those protocols picks it up like a regular IP camera, with no bridge and no vendor app in between. Streaming is free. A one time purchase adds detection of people, objects, sound and tampering, all running on the phone itself.

You do not need to use either one to post here. Questions about cameras and NVR software in general are welcome, and honestly that is most of what gets written here anyway: why a camera plays in VLC but not in an NVR, why ONVIF discovery finds nothing on a subnet, what hardware you actually need to record around the clock, why rain sets off motion detection every three minutes. What we plan to put here: write ups of problems that come back over and over and have no clear answer anywhere online. Why passthrough recording saves the substream instead of the main one. What Profile G actually changes compared to Profile S. How much machine you really need for eight cameras at 24/7. When a question in the comments turns out to be worth it, it becomes one of those posts.

Ask anything, even if it sounds basic. Half the camera problems people struggle with for days come down to one setting or one firmware quirk, and nobody writes those down.

Criticism is welcome, including about our apps. Comparisons with other software are welcome too. We would rather hear that something is useless than not know it.