640x360. They claim it's 480p. Maybe oy half-interlaces? Hah
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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"Doorbell with a subscription" is something so utterly stupid, an absolute misdevelopment.
The fuck does it even need a subscription for, anyway? Is it not hosting the videos locally? Fuck that.
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From the listing:
Answer your door from anywhere in the world with this remote viewing Video Doorbell.
So I assume you're not expected to self-host this. Which means they have to run and maintain servers. And $16/person ain't covering the cost of this device + servers indefinitely.
It's a rebranded Tuya doorbell. So there aren't any subscriptions, though you will be giving them all your data.
Which means they have to run and maintain servers.
I'd bet money that it works just like similar devices from Reolink. Local recording to SD Card or NVR. If you want cloud recording then you're paying a monthly subscription.
This device from Aldi is at a very low pricepoint but it's specs are garbage. 480p recording? In 2025? C'mon...
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you can make very cheap to maintain peer to peer solutions
you can use a STUN server to discover your public IP and use a method called UDP hole punching to open a port others can connect to. STUN servers are very cheap to run: they don’t actually handle the data; just provide a kind of handshake service in the middle for coordinating
this is often used for peer to peer video chat etc
I'm sure you can. Do you think that's what they expect their users to do? Or that it's something they're going to facilitate?
there are public STUN servers: just like DNS, STUN is a fairly critical part of modern infrastructure
peer to peer real time video is a fairly solved problem. the fact that we have google/amazon/zoom/etc in the middle isn’t because it’s necessary
that having been said, STUN servers are also incredibly cheap to run… i wouldn’t consider it exactly off the cards for a company that’s selling products to support a public STUN server indefinitely… it’s not quite as simple as them having to pay tens of thousands /mo in infrastructure costs to keep the lights on: it’s more like $100/mo, which at numbers that small you’d make back in just interest on the sales you made… but i reckon it could go something like “support for 10 years” and then they release an update that lets you set your own STUN server; perhaps defaulting to a public, free one
any chance this can be done through your router/modem, where your phone app connects to external ip of router and is the "server end point" for your doorbell?
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Stop putting bloody cameras bloody everywhere bloody hell!
Especially IoT ones controlled by massive corporations
I always thought it would be cool to have a doorbell that, when pressed, would flash a red light on the person standing there and then a machine voice would say 'Target Acquired'.
£17.
how about i dont need a video doorbell and i can use my eyeballs and look out the window
Good luck doing that in my place.
i get it that tech is cool and stuff, but as ive gotten older, ive learned not to rely on it as much
Yeah, but you literally cannot see where the doorbell is at my place. It's a physical impossibility. I live on the second floor of a two flat with an enclosed entryway. No window anywhere in the building can see who rang the doorbell. Glad that works for you.
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