FOSCAM HD 720P Outdoor WiFi Security Camera – Weatherproof IP66 Bullet / 1MP IP Wireless Surveillance Camera System with iOS/Android App, Night Vision up to 65ft, and More (FI9800P)

I have this Foscam FI9800P camera mounted outside our house, under the front porch facing our front entrance which allows us to monitor who comes near our porch/door for security purposes as well as to know when guests have arrived and when packages have been delivered. The FI9800P was easy to setup due to not having to run an ethernet cable outside to the camera. The WiFi signal outside our house on the front porch is fairly weak. Some devices like older phones/tablets don’t work too well when we are sitting out on the porch, but the higher gain antenna of the FI9800P enabled a pretty reliable wireless connection despite the long distance between our router and the porch.The FI9800P also supports wired ethernet with PoE which is the the way to go if you have the infrastructure to support it. It's nice that the FI9800P has options for wired ethernet and external mic/speakers but the connectors for these are on cables that extend from the camera and there is no way to remove them if they are not needed. This makes it a little difficult to cleanly conceal the wiring of the camera. Also, the power cable is very short. I purchased a cheap DC barrel jack extension cable on eBay which enabled the power cord to reach the AC outlet at the bottom of our porch.I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 connected via ethernet inside my home to automate several actions around the camera as well as record the live video stream. I have an FTP server (proftpd) running on the rpi and configured the FI9800P to send snapshot pictures to the FTP server on the rip when motion is detected. I wrote a Python script which uses a filesystem watcher library (watchdog) to monitor the FTP drop folder for new files. When a new image file is dropped in the folder, several actions are triggered in the Python script.I use Python’s built-in smtplib and email.* modules to send a notification email through gmail’s SMTP server (smtp.gmail.com:587). I created a separate gmail account just for notification purposes and I changed the account settings to allow less secure apps to access the account. I send an SMS message to my phone by sending an email to my phone provider’s sms email gateway. The email address for most gateway providers is usually something like [email protected]. If you attach the snapshot jpeg image sent from the camera to the email as a MIME Multipart message you should receive a MMS message on your phone with the picture.I also use a 433Mhz wireless doorbell receiver to play a soft chime sound during certain hours of the day when motion is detected which alerts us ahead of time whenever anyone approaches the the front porch whether they ring the doorbell or not. Instead of wiring up the transmitter to the rip GPIO pins to trigger the receiver (one way to do it), I used the RFSniffer utility from the 433Utils project on GitHub to learn/capture the 433Mhz ASK signal from the transmitter. I replay the signal using the codesend utility from the same 433Utils project and a cheap 433Mhz transmitter module from eBay. These are the same utilities that can be used to capture/replay the transmitter codes from popular 433Mhz controlled AC outlet plugs which I use in my house as well.The FI9800P does not have internal/external storage options so I am recording the live video stream to a mounted USB flash drive on the rpi. The H.264 live stream from the FI9800P, as well as most Foscam cameras, can be accessed via a url similar to: "rtsp://<user>:<pass>@<camera-ip>:<port(544)>/videoMain" (for the main video stream). While you could start recording from the rpi only when a motion event is triggered, you risk not capturing important footage as it can take several seconds to connect to the live camera stream and start recording it. Instead, I record the live stream continuously in small 60-120 second segments using the following command line: "avconv -i rtsp://<user>:<pass>@<camera-ip>:<port>/videoMain -vcodec copy -an -t <duration> <output-file>.mp4". This saves the H.264 stream to disk without having to do any transcoding of the video which keeps the CPU low (single digits) on the rpi.I overlap recorded segments by 30 seconds so as not not to miss any content and have tasks setup to automatically delete the video segments after recording them if no motion has been detected while they were recorded. The -an command line option to avconv excludes the audio stream from the recording. If you connect an external microphone to the FI9800P and want to record audio as well, you will need to change the .mp4 output extension to .mkv or transcode the audio to a format like AAC because the pcm_mulaw audio format used by Foscam cameras (and many others) is not compatible with the mp4 container format.Recording the live stream from the camera over WiFi to the rpi has been working pretty well although I do get some occasional artifact or pixilation in some recorded segments for short periods of time which is most likely due to some packet loss on my unoptimized home network. I’m satisfied with the quality of the 720p video and the IR night vision on the FI9800P is very good. The motion detection has also been working good so far with very few (if any) false motion triggers which is probably helped somewhat by the camera being mounted under a covered porch. The FI9800P also has five adjustable motion sensitivity levels you can play with if needed.

Foscam's FI9800P wireless outdoor camera is a great surveillance camera for the price. The video quality is clear, has a wide view, and it has support for a microphone and speaker for audio. Setup is breeze, if you're familiar with these types of cameras. If not, it's not that difficult and would probably take about 15-30 minutes to set up. To set it up, you'll need to plug it directly into your router. From there, download the Foscam camera manager, scan the QR code, and fill out the necessary information.The UI is easy to use and intuitive for managing the camera and recorded images. For storage, the camera doesn't have a micro SD slot. You'll need a cloud storage service or a home server with FTP support. This camera seems to be meant for smaller spaces, if you plan on using night vision. The infrared has a range of about 20-25 feet. The push notification and email alerts are awesome. When you have your camera set up to detect motion, you can have the camera notify you through the app or send you the image by email when it triggers.For construction, the housing is well made. The base and housing are made of a thick metal. There are two mounting holes; some screws and drywall anchors are included. The camera has a thick cable leading out of it, which splits off into several other cables. The cables consist of a audio input and out connector, power connector, a Power Over Ethernet (PoE) connector, and a reset button. Unless you can hide these cables behind the wall, you'll need a weatherproof junction box.Overall, I think it's a great camera for the price. It's easy to set up and works well for home surveillance. This product was packaged in a retail box and includes a mounting kit, an AC adapter, an installation/user manual CD, a quick setup guide, and a warning sticker.

Seems to be a decent camera quality wise I'm fairly happy. However, I found it impossible to setup using my Macbook Pro running OS X 10.11.6. I tried setting it up with the latest version of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. NONE WORKED!!! I was finally able to setup the camera by booting into Windows and setting it up from there. Even after upgrading both the firmware and the plugin to the latest versions as of this writing I still am unable to login to the camera from my Mac. Oddly enough, once I got the camera set up, I was able to view them using the uFoscam app on my Mac - but forget trying to login via a browser. After some searching the web, I found others having the same issue which has yet to be fixed. If I didn't have access to Windows these cameras would have been sent back as totally useless to me. If and when Foscam ever fixes this issue I'll update my review to reflect that... until then, if you are on a Mac, you've been warned that this camera may be useless to you. I've never been more frustrated in trying to get an IPcam working in my life - and I have several older Foscam MJPEG cameras that I never had issues like this with.