Our Motorola video monitor has developed the common issue of a failing power connection. Rather than get fixed or replace i’m considering buying an IP Camera and using our iphones instead.

Seems like there are loads of IP cameras on Amazon for 30-50 squids with decent reviews.

Anyone done this? Got any recommendations for cameras and/or apps to use?

Yes, don’t expose the damned thing directly to the internet. They are cheap, disposable linux distros with a million security flaws with a camera attached.

If you do plan on doing this, punch a single hole in your router’s firewall and set it up to forward traffic from that port to a separate VPN server on your LAN. Make the password something long a complex and use your phone’s VPN setting to connect to it.

Accessing the camera would then just be like browsing to it on your home wireless.

Second stage woudl be to ensure that the VPN server (Raspberry Pi running OpenVPM or a homebrew PPTP VPN server) is updated whenever new packages come out. You could also throw an IDS/IPS and Splunk in the mix, but that will need something more beefy sitting next to your router.

Camera; Tenvis make cheap ones.
App: Camviewer is ok and free

is there any easy way to restrict it just to my wifi network?

I’ve done exactly this. Used one of these, less than £20, with an option for free quick (under 2 weeks) delivery.
Binned the chinese power adapter and use a normal USB phone charger. Attached it to a flexible arm recycled from a desk lamp.

I used the sricam app to set it up, but then just use the rtsp feed from it, view it on phone / ipad using bs player or vlc.

It uses ports 5000 (UPNP) and 544 (rtsp). Both are inherently blocked by NAT to the outside world. I can access the rtsp feed it remotely through VPN if I’m bothered, but we don’t generally go out and leave the baby in her cot so there’s really no need to be able to access from the WAN side.

Unless you port forward the ports on your router it will only be accessible from the LAN side.

I have one of these and pretty good for the price:

https://www.mymemory.co.uk/clever-dog-smart-camera-wifi-monitor-blue.html