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I used to have a Ring and became concerned about privacy once Amazon took over. Worse, all it used to capture was delivery people's backs - by the time it would see motion the action was almost over. That's when it captured anything at all - it used to miss a lot.

Reolink doesn't require any Internet access - even for initial setup. People detection works great with Frigate and you can tell it to start recording before motion is detected so you don't miss anything.

Full disclosure, it does take some fiddling to get it working reliably. I still don't have 2 way audio working.

The Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3a both support eSIM.

(The Pixel 2 sort of did but only for Google Fi.)

The Pixel 3 briefly supported DSDS (pSIM+ eSIM) in a beta but it was removed before general release.

Pixel 3a was the first Pixel to officially support DSDS.

Since you're already running Hass why not set up Media Assistant. Connect your speakers to a Raspberry Pi running piCorePlayer.

I have a few around the house and they work great.

Media Assistant is still a work in progress. If that's a problem for you you can use Logitech Media Server instead, which is what I was using until recently.

When I was still playing with it and it was sitting on my desk I did notice that it ran a bit warm. Not hot enough to be a concern but now you have me thinking it might be an advantage in cooler climates. The lack of a battery makes me less concerned about cold as well. I've only had it a few months but it seems far more reliable than the Ring doorbell I'd been using previously. I do have it rebooting nightly but I haven't had to touch it in months. Winters here don't often go below 0F anymore. I guess I'll see how it goes.

Homebridge might be worth a shot. I know its Nest integration is better in some ways than HA's native integration.

"The open source part of iVentoy" is on GitHub. Perhaps it's not completely open?

Maybe my use case is unusual. This is my only camera and I'd prefer avoiding an NVR setup - mostly because I don't love the idea of running a constant hi def video stream over WiFi.

The documentation for this camera made me think it would be able to detect motion and record a video of activity from a few seconds before the motion was detected until a few seconds after it ends and FTP it to a server of my choice. From what I can see, it can successfully do this for snapshots but not for videos.

Back to your question, I upgraded immediately to the latest firmware before doing anything - the Home Assistant addon told me to. I then tried going back one version to see if it was just a bug in the latest firmware.

As an aside, the HA integration seems to be working flawlessly. It would be pretty easy to have HA trigger a capture of the video stream but that wouldn't contain the pre-motion capture that the doorbell seems to have.

As luck would have it, I finally got a response from Reolink through Walmart in response to my opening a return ticket a few days ago. I'll give them a couple more days to troubleshoot and update here.

That is one expensive doorbell!