r/frigate_nvr • u/OldMathematician5973 • 9d ago
Frigate is awesome!!
My zoneminder install took a dump this week... so I started checking out alternatives. Why wasn't I using this earlier?! The object detection is just great right out of the box. I've got 10 cameras on an old i7 ProDesk that I had lying around. I have some issues with the console and h265 encoding on a couple of the cams, but that appears to be a linux browser issue - not the software. But overall.....great stuff. That is all.
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u/InevitableArm3462 9d ago
Yup. Even great with home assistant. I have very nice quality automations that I can't be without. It's even better with the plus. So much worth it. Almost no false positives out of box
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u/PizzaResident89 9d ago
Camera states as sensors in HA changed the game for me. Gate open? Camera tells me, forgot bins? Camera knows, child eating dirt? No one cares
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u/Jeriath27 9d ago
Really? Mine keeps detecting animals and even spuderwebs as people. Does plus help that?
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u/DrYellow922 9d ago
Yes, it's a significant improvement.
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u/Jeriath27 6d ago
well, hopefully it ruling out false positives is really a thing. I got it and initially it got much worse lol. Its picking up tires and windows as people now lol
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u/QuirkyPension4654 9d ago
It feels like a few generations ahead of ZM. Before you know it there’s a new release and more functionality or easier to do things.
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u/ripnetuk 9d ago
I've tried most of them. Frigate is awesome, does a great job and happy to run in docker so one less windows VM to manage. And free :)
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u/Controversial_Cube 9d ago
Reading the first sentence: "Why does he feel the need to tell us this?"
Reading the other following sentences: "Let's go!"
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u/Windera1 9d ago edited 9d ago
Is Frigate suitable to run in a Proxmox VM with its appdata on a NFS share (from Truenas), so it can be a High Availability (Cluster) resource?
No Coral involved.
Not fussed about detection - just want a record of stuff moving (i.e. the NVR bit) LOL
7+ POE Annke cameras
Prox nodes are Dell T7820 (128 GB RAM and a Ryzen 5 (64 GB RAM)
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u/DrYellow922 9d ago
Very likely? Just fire up a VM, install Docker, mount the NFS share to the directory you'll use for Frigate media and see how it all goes.
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u/RetroRaiderRun 9d ago
It will double the latency and can create problems, but it's doable. Not recommended, but doable.
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u/Windera1 9d ago
So is it the NFS share from truenas (which runs on an R730) that would cause the problems?
I assume truenas can be used for the recordings storage, rather than on the Prox Node?
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u/RetroRaiderRun 9d ago
That is one aspect. Its recommended to give Frigate access to an SSD for its cache and small database. You can store the video recordings on a separate NFS.
This was recently added as a feature for Home Assistant integration. In the past (older versions of Frigate and Home Assistant), it was harder to use network storage with Frigate.
https://docs.frigate.video/guides/ha_network_storage/
Separately, it can increase the latency of the detection device. How long it takes to identify motion on screen. If you run a Google Coral TPU or other detection device, running them in a VM can increase their latency (reduce performance).
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u/Windera1 9d ago
I'll look into the link re Home Assistant, though storage related to 'that' HA is not on my use case radar.
I was concerned about recording outages arising from a Prox Node being down, hence the Prox High Availability flavour of 'HA'.
These 'HA' instances remind me of the skit describing the standardisation of postal codes for USA :)
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u/Aequitas-X 7d ago
Have frigate running in lxc, local database and nfs for recording.... Works very well
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u/Galenbo 7d ago
Not really.
Storage location is unflexible and when mapped, when nfs/smb connection falls away it fills up the boot drive till death.
Better run it on top of the storage.
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u/Windera1 7d ago
So 'on top of storage' would be as a Truenas App on the R730?
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u/Galenbo 7d ago
After exploring all other options, only those were stable to me: * frigate docker on proxmox, storage mounted on proxmox * frigate app on truenas.
Currently running the last one, with the "install as yaml" trick so I can choose the version.
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u/Windera1 5d ago
Were you using Truenas Community ver?
I can see heaps of settings required to install Frigate as an App, but nothing that said 'yaml' to me.
Maybe it is buried in a lower level after I choose a top level option somewhere?
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u/zeta_cartel_CFO 8d ago
After trying out a few self-hostable NVR apps, I settled on frigate and have been running it for couple of years now. Once I got past the initial hurdles of figuring out the config and setup for my cams, its been rock solid. I don't think I've had to really touch it or fix anything that unexpectedly broke because of a upgrade or something. What I like about it is that it just works.
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u/ActiveBat7236 9d ago
Yeah I'm an ex-Zoneminder myself. A part of me still misses it though as I've been using it for nearly 20 years!
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u/OldMathematician5973 9d ago
And in that 20 years......zero ui updates.
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u/ActiveBat7236 9d ago edited 9d ago
Ha yeah, it is looking a bit 'retro' now, but in a way I liked the persistent familiarity of it! All that said, having now moved over to Frigate it's made me realise how much Zoneminder has seemingly got stuck in a rut as they seem world's apart.
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u/IAmMarwood 9d ago
As an ex user at one time or another (I liked to keep trying them all) the only one I get an occasional twinge of missing it is BlueIris but still nowhere near bad enough to make me switch back from Frigate AND having to spin up a Windows server.
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u/RetroRaiderRun 9d ago
I have some issues with the console and h265 encoding on a couple of the cams
It's worth using h264 over h265. While you can theoretically get 25% better quality or storage space, that can come at the cost of reliability and speed. For Frigate, it's highly recommended to stick to h264, especially for a first-time setup. h264 has more universal and reliable support across many different hardware devices. We're trying to combine cameras, a server, and a playback device, which all use different hardware. Pick the most compatible format, which is h264.
If you change the settings on the actual cameras to output h264 to Frigate, it will make it much easier. Otherwise, you may have to convert from h265 to h264 in certain situations, which comes at a huge performance penalty. Transcoding 10 cameras with h265 streams at 2k resolution to h264 would overload most CPUs.
Displaying your cameras in a browser is one of the situations where you may have to convert from h265 to other formats.
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u/OldMathematician5973 8d ago
That's good to know but I don't know if I have a choice in this scenario. The 4 cameras that do the h265 are the lower line of amcrest 'smart home' stuff ..my other cams that have a gui and are adjustable are their more standard poe pro cameras.
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u/RetroRaiderRun 8d ago
What is the model? Normally, h264 is the default setting and h265 is an option.
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u/[deleted] 9d ago
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