Frigate NVR

[joth]

I recently set frigate.video up on the old server PC for CCTV recording and I'm very impressed with it. Planning to turn down my windows machine currently running BlueIris on.

 

Frigate uses Tensorflow for real-time object detection, and works best with a coral.ai EdgeTPU. They're difficult to get hold of now (global chip shortages) but I did manage to but a M.2 PCIe one from RS. Two adapter cards later (M.2 R key to PCIe mini, and PCIe mini to PCIe standard!) and it's working very reliably. But for simplicity definitely get the USB Dev dongle if you can!

Constant image detection hardly adds any power demand to the 50W this machine already draws (mostly on 6 spinning disk raid array) so I will knock 40W off my base load by turning down the other windows machine.

 

Configuration took a bit of tuning, the cameras have substreams and it's best to use those for lower res feed for the image detection and then it will record clips from the corresponding high Res (8MP) feed when anything is detected.

The built in webui is simple but very usable, far better than the clunky android app for BlueIris, or the QNAP NVR I briefly tried.

 

Good MQTT support and a premade Home Assistant integration so easy to build into other use cases.

I found the driveway PIR I installed was false triggering the front lights all night, so I've disabled that and instead use the "person" detector from the CCTV, covers a much larger area with so far (2 weeks) zero false positives.

 

We have a shared driveway, with the zones and masks and detection I can easily set it to only trigger when someone walks on "our" side of the driveway.  Great fun!

I've set it to detect other interesting object types (car, bicycle, cat, elephant) but I think I'd need much higher res detection stream for cat detection to work, and our street is disappointingly devoid of wondering elephants.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 25, 2022 by joth

[MJNewton]

9 hours ago, joth said:

Constant image detection hardly adds any power demand to the 50W this machine already draws (mostly on 6 spinning disk raid array) so I will knock 40W off my base load by turning down the other windows machine.

 

I've been toying with the idea of doing something about my own CCTV setup... It's a Zoneminder installation that's been running on a desktop PC (sold as a server but for all intents and purposes that's what it is) for over 10 years now and whilst I've never given the power consumption a second thought when the machine was used for all sorts of other things - including my 'daily use' computer - it now sits there most of the time drawing 30-50W just monitoring video feeds. If I can get a Pi 4 to take on the role I could probably save £50/yr.

 

I was looking at Shinobi but will also check out Frigate too so thanks!

Edited January 25, 2022 by MJNewton

[Radian]

Thanks for the heads up on this @joth Coincidentally I spent the morning looking into NVR as I've just assembled  half a dozen ESP32 Camera boards and need object detection (for small rodents) But the streams are all MJPEG so maybe a bit too crap for this. I have a Rapsberry Pi 4 set aside for the server just need to find a  Google Coral. The Pihut are sold out.?

[AliMcLeod]

On 25/01/2022 at 08:25, joth said:

...our street is disappointingly devoid of wondering elephants.

 

Nice set-up - i've still not gotten around to selecting cameras for us - have this great dream about doing number plate recognition and linking that in to our gate (which is electrified but not yet automated) so that it automatically opens for pre-defined friends/family.

 

On a less serious note, how does Frigate Video work out the contemplative status of elephants?

 

Edited January 28, 2022 by AliMcLeod

[Adsibob]

If I were to use my PC that I have on most of the time anyway, at least when I’m working, for the Frigate’s server, what happens on the occasion that I need to restart my PC? Do I just lose the camera functionality for when the PC is off, or will I need to relaunch the Frigate software and tinker with it. 
 

And how much RAM from my PC will I lose to this? Just wondering if it’s feasible to use my work PC as a simultaneous server.

[SteamyTea]

22 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

how much RAM from my PC will I lose to this? Just wondering if it’s feasible to use my work PC as a simultaneous server

What sort of work do you do on it. A few Word documents, PDFs and a basic spreadsheet are not going goi worry it much.

7 million rows of Excel conditional sums might. As will heavy video editing.

Best way to upgrade a PC us to downgrade the software.

Edited May 29, 2022 by SteamyTea

[Adsibob]

46 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

What sort of work do you do on it. A few Word documents, PDFs and a basic spreadsheet are not going goi worry it much.

7 million rows of Excel conditional sums might. As will heavy video editing.

Best way to upgrade a PC us to downgrade the software.

My problem is that I often have a lot of documents open at once, and it’s common for a PDF to be c 50MB to 500MB in size, because despite it being prominently text based files, the encoding/OCR of the documents are sometimes really inefficient. But all my work is text based. So a few of those large PDFs, a dozen outlook messages open, Chrome with maybe 15 tabs, Excel with one or two sheets and a couple of word documents. The excel sheets are usually very basic. I have a intel corr i5 3.2ghz cpu with 16Gb ram, running Windows 10 Pro. It has a stupidly good nvidia Gforce graphics card because it used to be used mainly as a gaming pc.  It works very well on the whole, though sporadically will crash for no reason, maybe once a month.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Adsibob

[joth]

9 hours ago, Adsibob said:

If I were to use my PC that I have on most of the time anyway, at least when I’m working, for the Frigate’s server, what happens on the occasion that I need to restart my PC? Do I just lose the camera functionality for when the PC is off, or will I need to relaunch the Frigate software and tinker with it. 
 

And how much RAM from my PC will I lose to this? Just wondering if it’s feasible to use my work PC as a simultaneous server.

Sounds like you plan to run Frigate under Windows? That's well off the charts of what I have tried, I have it on a Ubuntu workstation (mostly now just used as a server)

 

I'd take a good look at this:

https://docs.frigate.video/installation#operating-system

Windows is not officially supported, but some users have had success getting it to run under WSL or Virtualbox. Getting the GPU and/or Coral devices properly passed to Frigate may be difficult or impossible. Search previous discussions or issues for help.

[Adsibob]

5 hours ago, joth said:

Sounds like you plan to run Frigate under Windows? That's well off the charts of what I have tried, I have it on a Ubuntu workstation (mostly now just used as a server)

 

I'd take a good look at this:

https://docs.frigate.video/installation#operating-system

Windows is not officially supported, but some users have had success getting it to run under WSL or Virtualbox. Getting the GPU and/or Coral devices properly passed to Frigate may be difficult or impossible. Search previous discussions or issues for help.

Have no idea what Ubuntu is? Sounds like a witch doctor, or a carton of sugary juice drink.., oh no that’s Umbungo. Sounds like Ftigate is going to be too geeky for me, and I will have to get Ring. Already have a Ring doorbell, so it’s probably the easiest option.

[SteamyTea]

7 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

Ubuntu

One meaning is Humanity.

Another is a Linux distribution.

It is a totally free to use OS for PCs.  Odd concept being free.  If only there was open source building designs that worked.

Edited May 30, 2022 by SteamyTea

[joth]

2 hours ago, Adsibob said:

Have no idea what Ubuntu is? Sounds like a witch doctor, or a carton of sugary juice drink.., oh no that’s Umbungo. Sounds like Ftigate is going to be too geeky for me, and I will have to get Ring. Already have a Ring doorbell, so it’s probably the easiest option.

Ah yeah OK if you're at the stage of choosing Frigate vs Ring then Ring is probably the answer. The reason for Frigate is to avoid proprietary hardware that is locked into cloud dependency, so you can really use any IP Camera from Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, etc etc. and run the whole stack on your local network without it being dependent on a working internet connection. If you're not already planning to do that sort of thing then jumping straight in with Frigate will be a bit bewildering I imagine.

 

If you want something to just plugin and use, Ring and Nest are you main choices, although if you want it integrated with a top rated alarm that also has a local API for integrations, I'm increasingly interested in https://ajax.systems/ (Ukrainian based company, hope they are doing ok, looks like they've just opened a manufacturing collocation in Turkey)

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by joth

[Adsibob]

4 hours ago, joth said:

Ah yeah OK if you're at the stage of choosing Frigate vs Ring then Ring is probably the answer. The reason for Frigate is to avoid proprietary hardware that is locked into cloud dependency, so you can really use any IP Camera from Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, etc etc. and run the whole stack on your local network without it being dependent on a working internet connection. If you're not already planning to do that sort of thing then jumping straight in with Frigate will be a bit bewildering I imagine.

The way I see it, my home server is probably more likely to fail than the cloud storage or the wifi, and so I'm happy to outsource that side of things to a third party. I guess a clever intruder could cut the internet cable from outside before commencing his intrusion. I don't have an answer to that other than to set up a ring camera so that it catches him before he snips it, but I guess that won't stop the intrusion.

As for the complaints about subscriptions, they are probably not that dissimilar to the cost of setting up and powering a home server

 

4 hours ago, joth said:

If you want something to just plugin and use, Ring and Nest are you main choices, although if you want it integrated with a top rated alarm that also has a local API for integrations, I'm increasingly interested in https://ajax.systems/ (Ukrainian based company, hope they are doing ok, looks like they've just opened a manufacturing collocation in Turkey)

 

Had a quick look at Ajax. Looks interesting. What do you know of them / how did you come across them?

[joth]

2 hours ago, Adsibob said:

Had a quick look at Ajax. Looks interesting. What do you know of them / how did you come across them?

 

Positive feedback  comes up from time to time on this FB group 

 

https://m.facebook.com/groups/2351171578254146?group_view_referrer=search

 

 

3 hours ago, Adsibob said:

The way I see it, my home server is probably more likely to fail than the cloud storage or the wifi, and so I'm happy to outsource that side of things to a third party. ...

 

Yeah this is pretty reasonable way to look at. I think it mostly comes down to a idealistic view of running the whole lot yourself with uncertain setup and long-term maintenance time investment vs outsourcing it and having unknown future service price increases or risk of discontinuation