First off, you have to look at what the Internet circuit speed is at yours and your daughter's location. If you don't have enough bandwidth, then this is a non starter. Also is there a monthly data cap.

Second, it depends on the CODEC you're going to use as to how much bandwidth the stream will consume.

Third, are you looking to stream 24/7/365? Or is there going to be a specific trigger before a stream is sent.

Fourth, you're going to have to expose your NAS to the Internet for the video stream from your daughter's cameras to send the video. Are you ok with this? I wouldn't.

 

Thanks zx10guy.

All good considerations that I hadn't necessarily looked at.

The NAS is exposed for media streaming as I shared to family via Plex, although I try and keep the minimum amount of it open and as many services disabled as possible, unless needed.

Was also considering running a VPN server locally for it to connect through. Although that may provide a extra element of protection it also adds an extra level of complexity.

I would rather it was a triggered stream, which is something I have been looking into a bit. 24/7/365 is a lot of potentially wasted bandwidth and HDD utilisation.

 

Plex does video streaming of an SSL connection so it's secure by default. To do a video stream across the Internet, you'll have to set up FTP as I'm not aware of any other file sharing protocol that will work properly over the Internet. Doing this to your NAS will expose your NAS to security risks. As I said, I wouldn't do it, but it's up to you on whether you're willing to accept the risk. The same as those that allow naked RDP connections into their system from the Internet. The assumption I have is since this is a NAS, you're probably storing some very personal and sensitive information on that NAS. I've never been a fan of exposing any device that has that type of information stored on it to the Internet.

I too run a Plex Media server. The difference is I run it separate from my file server. My Plex server is exposed to the Internet for me to access my content on the go. My file server is not. The only way I can access my file server remotely is through my SSL VPN concentrator.

To configure a triggered stream, the IP camera system you use has to have the ability to set a specific point in the camera's field of view where the camera will send a stream when anything in that trigger area changes. Another way to do this is to run something such as Blue Iris and constantly stream the video to the software. Blue Iris has facial/human recognition capability to focus on if faces/humans move into the camera's field of view which would then trigger recording. But this requires you to run an instance at the remote location and at that point you might as well run an NVR.

So the long and the short of it is, in my opinion, bite the proverbial bullet and install an NVR at the remote location.

 

Thanks for the info, much appreciated