EncryptKeeper’s explanation is perfectly concise and informative if you have a cursory grasp of self hosting and networking.

If it’s not making sense to you, I would suggest revisiting some of the technical fundamentals of self-hosting, which admittedly is quite an advanced topic that most people don’t, and do not need to care about.

You would be equally well-served, perhaps more so (if you don’t really care about privacy or terms of service) by sticking to regular cloud services. The road to self-hosting is arduous and if done wrongly, causes you more harm than good. Especially if your technical foundation is not yet strong. Which your posts suggest is the case.

What is this I don’t even

This is 100% me but for Lemmy.

Can confirm, I bit the bullet for a CR2004 last year and it took me a couple of weeks at least to set it up the way I wanted. Powerful, but steep with a capital S.

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.