Thank you for sharing all this, very interesting to read as I have my automation based on mostly the same technologies, and also have most of it at our summer cottage.
I’ve got several different CCTV cameras setup there and can you some hints to avoid making the same mistakes I have done. First of all, forget Blynk for video. I’ve never got it to reliably work with more than a single video stream on a project. I have even tried adding buttons that switch the single video stream to get pass the limitation. They seem to work reliably on my Samsung tablet but on both my old and brand new Samsung phones I need to press back and reactivate the project for the stream to refresh.
For the cameras I strongly recommend trying to buy all from the same manufacturer to make things skmpler. If you wish to also use them for security monitoring, choose cameras that have good night vision (and can see IR light) but no IR leds (or which can be disabled). Then install separate IR floodlights. The last bit is paramount. You don’t want spiderwebs to false trigger motion detection all the time as the IR light attracts flying insects which naturally attract spiders.
For automation ideally you want cameras that can be remotely controlles through simple HTTP requests. Most cheap ones come with a Windows only, javascript based admin interface which might be difficult to make work with external requests.
For storage I recommend a single NFS or FTP share. This allows you to for example monitor the changed files using Node-RED for sending notifications.
For remote monitoring on the phone instead of Blynk I suggest IPCameraViewer which has both Android and iOS versions. It’s not flashy but very robust and supports huge amount of different cameras.
Let me know of you have any questions regarding this and I try my best to answer.
Good luck with tour projects!
Edit: fixed autocomplete induced typos, missing words and added some clarifications in case someone else ends up reading this.