Retrase

Retrase is a self-hosted home-camera viewer shaped like the camera apps you already know: a device list, a live view, and browsable history. The difference is where it all lives — on your hardware, with footage that never leaves it. Google Nest cameras (over the Smart Device Management API) and any RTSP camera sit behind one device abstraction, so the app doesn’t care which vendor a camera came from.

It’s built as two planes that never mix: a control plane serves the device list and hands out short-lived, token-signed URLs, while a separate media relay pulls each camera and fans the H.264 out to your browser and phone over WebRTC. History records continuously into self-contained MP4 clips — with keyframe thumbnails — on storage you control, muxed by hand with no ffmpeg in the path.

The stack is lean C++ built from vendored source: a Boost.Beast control plane and a libdatachannel WebRTC relay, plus a React admin dashboard and an Expo mobile app. Self-hostable with an Ansible + systemd deploy — no Docker, no cloud account. A shared bearer token gates both planes end to end.