borexola/neolink.net

Neolink.NET is a bridge for Reolink security cameras that speak a proprietary protocol called Baichuan instead of the standard RTSP protocol that most video software expects. It sits between your cameras and whatever software you actually want to watch them with, such as Frigate, Blue Iris, Home Assistant, VLC, or ffmpeg. Neolink.NET logs into each camera, pulls apart its video stream, and re-serves it as standard RTSP that any of those tools can understand, without needing a Reolink NVR box or modifying the cameras themselves. It is written in C# and .NET, inspired by an earlier open-source project of the same idea called Neolink. On top of the bridging, it includes a built-in web interface you view in a browser, showing a wall of camera tiles with live low-latency video and no plugins required, along with an events page and a synced timeline for reviewing footage across multiple cameras. It also integrates directly with Home Assistant over MQTT, so each camera shows up automatically with motion, person, vehicle, and animal sensors, plus controls, all based on detections the camera's own hardware already performs. Because Neolink.NET does not run any of its own video analysis or object detection, it adds very little processing load and can run comfortably on something as small as a Raspberry Pi. Other features include two-way audio so you can talk through cameras that have a speaker, such as doorbells, several different layout modes for viewing multiple cameras at once, and a settings panel that reads a camera's own capabilities, like pan-tilt-zoom controls, zoom and focus, siren, and night mode, letting you stage changes before applying them. The project is maintained by one person in their spare time, and the README is upfront that it has only been tested against the cameras the maintainer personally owns, asking users with other camera models to report issues or contribute fixes. The full README is longer than what was shown.