Selfhosted

I have reolink cameras and they were pretty plug n play.

HA picked up the reolinks once connected, but integration with frigate requires some setup. The frigate HA integration works very well.

Oh and for notifications to work well... Or how you expected to work. Having the mqtt server setup will help as well.

None, at minimum you need to login to the web interface on the camera to set up a user/pass for ONVIF.

ONVIF needs a user with username and password, you will need at least a web interface to add it to the camera. What's the problem with a web app hosted by the camera?

Reolink ist the way to go. I think only the battery powered ones don't have onvif. Otherwise the poe cameras all support onvif and are generally of very good quality. Plug it in and of you go. EDIT: Forgot to mention: You can configure the camera via the web interface, so no need for an app. I'm using the 820 at the moment, but I'm planning to get the new trackmix camera, these look really good.

I use tp-link Tapo cameras and they work great! Yes you have to use there app to see them up the first time and provide username and pass for rtsp feed but after that toss them in your NVR software and boom good to go!

I did exactly this last year to monitor my cats at home while I was on holiday.

I bought two of these - REOLINK RLC-811A: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09873G7X3

I assigned static IPs to both of these, and blocked all of their outgoing traffic to the public internet (in case Chairman Xi or Strongman Putin wants to also see what my cats are up to).

I then spun up a local motioneye container: https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye

The cameras by default (I think) provide rtsp streams, so I added the two streams (rtsp://somehostname.local:554/h265Preview_01_main) to motioneye and verified that I was able to view the camera streams on my local LAN.

The last step was simply to use cloudflare to as an authentication frontend to proxy my local motioneye container to my public domain name. Worked a treat!

Hope this helps, cheers.

None IIRC, are you not able to spin up a VM on the same VLAN as the cameras to set them up, and nuke the VM once setup complete?

You may have better luck setting up an airgapped NVR, using USB webcams instead, or just DIYing an IP camera using an SBC

seems not much. for sure, you should avoid fosscam! pure shit

I purchase cheap Anran branded IP cameras. So far they've been meh, but they don't require application to set up. They do support ONVIF but you have to configure it through web interface. For me that's good enough. Configure once, ban internet access since no Chinese stuff is ever getting access to internet from my network.

Whether they will work with mentioned software, I have no idea. I run my own form of software for security cameras by basically implementing FTP server, where most recent events are stored in Redis and hi resolution image is stored elsewhere on hard disk.

Woth Hikvision you can do the setup of the camera (user,pass,stream settings etc) via a web UI. From there you can use those settings in a camera rtsp sensor in HA. Not sure if this is still not what you wanted. It supports ONVOF too.