I've seen a few members (e.g., @Duh987@hawkeye217) here mention Frigate as an NVR. Does anyone use Frigate for 24/7 recording? If so, what hardware do you use it on? Is it better than some of the expensive commercial systems out there like DW Spectrum/Nx Witness if you're deploying for you home for about 10 ip cameras?
I would greatly appreciate hearing about your experience.
I've seen a few members (e.g., @Duh987@hawkeye217) here mention Frigate as an NVR. Does anyone use Frigate for 24/7 recording? If so, what hardware do you use it on? Is it better than some of the expensive commercial systems out there like DW Spectrum/Nx Witness if you're deploying for you home for about 10 ip cameras?
I would greatly appreciate hearing about your experience.
I'm curious to learn why you are heading in this direction vs using BI? As I could understand not going with DW / NX given the huge costs for the same.
Trying to understand if this is a financial limitation vs just wanting to learn something new and play with something??
I run Frigate on a NUC with a Coral device. I have it dedicated to watching my driveway with one camera and alerting me via Pushover when someone enters it. I set it up before DS was integrated into BI.
Once Code Project AI is more stable with BI I’ll probably just switch to that as I don’t really need two recording solutions. I see no need to use DS with BI since that may be phased out in the future.
I run Frigate on a NUC with a Coral device. I have it dedicated to watching my driveway with one camera and alerting me via Pushover when someone enters it. I set it up before DS was integrated into BI.
Once Code Project AI is more stable with BI I’ll probably just switch to that as I don’t really need two recording solutions. I see no need to use DS with BI since that may be phased out in the future.
I'm curious to learn why you are heading in this direction vs using BI? As I could understand not going with DW / NX given the huge costs for the same.
Trying to understand if this is a financial limitation vs just wanting to learn something new and play with something??
I didn't have a good experience with BI. I found it used a lot of power and generated a lot of heat on the old Dell computer. I found DW Spectrum and liked how it split the functions between the server and client. Today I was surfing the web and found Frigate. I'm planning to build out a Home Assistant set up so I'm very curious to learn more about Frigate, particularly how others have it set up.
I think you can run a few ip cameras using a Raspberry Pi 4, but you'll definitely want to have the Google Coral TPU added to it. Here's more: Recommended hardware | Frigate
I think you can run a few ip cameras using a Raspberry Pi 4, but you'll definitely want to have the Google Coral TPU added to it. Here's more: Recommended hardware | Frigate
Appreciate the resource link and believe I recall why Frigate wasn't in my list of NVR considerations. That was due to the fact its restricted or limited to the use of H.264 video codec. Maybe if I was doing this for someone else or where I just wanted a forth system to put around with I would use H.264
In 2022, I'm not going backwards to use early 2000 technology.
Appreciate the resource link and believe I recall why Frigate wasn't in my list of NVR considerations. That was due to the fact its restricted or limited to the use of H.264 video codec. Maybe if I was doing this for someone else or where I just wanted a forth system to put around with I would use H.264
In 2022, I'm not going backwards to use early 2000 technology.
Uisng H.264 is certainly less desirable because it will use more network bandwidth. But if I am only running a handful of ip cameras, will it really be noticeable?
Uisng H.264 is certainly less desirable because it will use more network bandwidth. But if I am only running a handful of ip cameras, will it really be noticeable?
That would depend on how robust your network is and your personal life. If you're like any other common household you'll have people constantly streaming something from: Music, YouTube, NetFlix, etc. You add on something that's constantly streaming from a camera to a NVR.
Expect there to be some bottlenecks . . .
1-4 cameras I can't see that being a real issue but than again there's a reason why lots of the top performing VMS / NVR software require more powerful computer systems. In part the people who code this software are lazy and its all about bloat and never ever thinking about using what's required and no more.
On the other side of the spectrum if you find something that's Lean & Mean more often than not its lacking all of the important features other more bloatware has. I'd be interested to learn how your journey goes with a less powerful computer system as my goal is for a ultra low power system too!
Eager to learn how your experience goes because I have no problems spinning up a test machine if only to learn if something can't vs can. Than again, my time is limited so I have to find balance in fun vs this is yet another job!
Is it possible your PC did not meet recommended minimum specs AND you did not perform the recommended optimizations including using sub streams?
In 2014 I ran 8 cameras using BI version 4 on a Celeron-based mini-ITX board with 4GB RAM, no Intel Quicksync HA and only used 30% CPU...and that was before sub streams.
Not a RPI on its own. They are too underpowered. Frigate is designed to use a Coral device or modern CPU as a last resort. You could use a RPI with a coral with no problems.
Is it possible your PC did not meet recommended minimum specs AND you did not perform the recommended optimizations including using sub streams?
In 2014 I ran 8 cameras using BI version 4 on a Celeron-based mini-ITX board with 4GB RAM, no Intel Quicksync HA and only used 30% CPU...and that was before sub streams.
I forget what version of BI it was--it was whatever was the most recent as of April 2021. My hardware at the time was an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 with an Intel Core i5-6500 Quad-core processor running at 3.2 GHz with 16GB of DDR4 SDRAM. I had three 4 MP ip cameras and recording both main and sub streams 24/7 to test it out. I just found the entire experience lacking. Maybe the hardware wasn't strong enough? It was listed a sufficient in the Wiki guide here.
I don't see the point of only using the sub stream--it defeats the purpose of having a higher definition camera. Instead, I want to use the substream to detect events (e.g., people trespassing and flag the date/time) and record the main stream 24/7. DW Spectrum works really well for this. I ran it on Ubuntu Server (no GUI to save on system resources) using a mini PC with an Intel Celeron J4125 processor and 8GB of DDR4. Of course, as others including @Teken have pointed out, DW Spectrum is very expensive. 80$US per camera for a license. After the 30 day trial period expired, I decided to look for something else.
Not a RPI on its own. They are too underpowered. Frigate is designed to use a Coral device or modern CPU as a last resort. You could use a RPI with a coral with no problems.
Yes, you definitely need the Google Coral TPU to do the identification of events, like someone trespassing on your yard as opposed to the tree branch moving in the wind. Otherwise, your CPU will be over taxed.
1-4 cameras I can't see that being a real issue but than again there's a reason why lots of the top performing VMS / NVR software require more powerful computer systems. In part the people who code this software are lazy and its all about bloat and never ever thinking about using what's required and no more.
I plan to connect 7 ip cameras to an unmanaged Netgear switch. I'll run an dual NIC mini PC on the 8th switch so the ip cameras will not have direct access to the internet. This is how I had DW Spectrum set up. From what I've read, I think I can do the same thing with Frigate, except I'll plug in a Google Coral TPU via USB (damn those things are expensive--is it really the chip shortage or just Google's market power?).
This set up should reduce the demand on the resource of the broader home network because the camera feeds will not run over the home network unless I call them up using my laptop.
You can record the main stream 24/7 in Blue Iris and use the sub stream for motion detection. All it takes is a clone of each camera. Record the original, root, camera in full resolution and use the clone with the sub stream to trigger alerts.
You can also record the sub stream and switch to the main stream when the cameras are triggered. In multi camera view on the console, UI3 or the app the lowered resolution makes no difference and when you switch to a single camera the full resolution version is displayed.
I run Frigate on a NUC with a Coral device. I have it dedicated to watching my driveway with one camera and alerting me via Pushover when someone enters it. I set it up before DS was integrated into BI.
Once Code Project AI is more stable with BI I’ll probably just switch to that as I don’t really need two recording solutions. I see no need to use DS with BI since that may be phased out in the future.
Ran across a posting on HA a while back, where he used Firgate+Coral TPU for AI detection, with NodeRed, MQTT that tells BI to record motion, along with BI recording 24x7.
I haven't been following Code Project AI, I assume someone can create an add-on to utilitze the TPU. Hopefully the stock for Coral TPU is replenished before then.
EDIT 01-27-2020: Frigate 0.8.0 has been released. I’ve updated the instructions below to reflect the latest version since there were a ton of changes. Still works great! EDIT 12-15-2020: I just noticed that Frigate has a 0.8.0 beta release, complete with NVIDIA support. The config made some...
I've seen a few members (e.g., @Duh987@hawkeye217) here mention Frigate as an NVR. Does anyone use Frigate for 24/7 recording? If so, what hardware do you use it on? Is it better than some of the expensive commercial systems out there like DW Spectrum/Nx Witness if you're deploying for you home for about 10 ip cameras?
I would greatly appreciate hearing about your experience.
I run Frigate with 6 cameras on an old Dell Optiplex that runs Home Assistant. I have a separate 4TB drive installed for 24/7 recordings. Frigate is super lightweight, it's been rock solid, and works so well in my experience. I've never used Blue Iris or a standalone NVR, but I'm a software developer so Frigate's ability to be fine tuned and perfectly configured for my needs is what I like about it. I've contributed a few features to the project, and the developer is about to release a new version that will eventually allow custom/personalized detection models to be used.
ipcamtalk.com
community.home-assistant.io
