I was thinking of setting up a home surveilance system using Frigate, and integrating it with Home Assistant. I’d probably have somewhere on the order of 10-15 1080p 30fps cameras. I’m not sure what components I should get for the server, as I am unsure of the actual processing requirements.
EDIT 1: For some extra information, I did find that Frigate has a recommended hardware page.
That’s quite a few cameras. I would do an audit on how many you will actually need first, because you will likely find you could get by with 5-10.
In terms of what you’ll need - any Intel chip that supports QuickSync will likely do for the main
ffmpegprocessing of the image, but you will definitely want a Google Coral TPU. If you do end up needing 10-15 cameras, you may end up needing the M2 with dual TPU version of the Coral. You will also want some form of reliable storage for your clips (NAS local or NFS), as well as the ability to back up those clips/shots to the cloud somewhere.I’m personally running 4 cameras (3x1080 @ 15fps, 1x4k @ 25fps) through my ~7 year old Synology DS418play NAS using Surveillance Station as the first ingestion point, then restreaming from there to Frigate. Now that Surveillance Station can accept external events via webhook, I may look to swap the direction, and ingest into Frigate first, then restream out to Surveillance Station for long-term storage.
“Why not directly use Frigate?” I hear you ask. Mostly because Frigate is pretty static. It’s all set up via YAML with no config UI currently, whereas I can tweak stuff on Surveillance Station quite easily.
That’s a fair point. I haven’t actually methodically gone through to see exactly how many I would need just yet. The numbers that I chose were somewhat just ballpark off the top of my head.
I am planning to give the camera server dedicated storage for the data. If I’m really feeling like splurging on it, I may look into getting WD Purple drives, or the like.
I’m not sure that I would need this very much. I’m mostly interested in a sort of ephemeral surveilance system; I only really need to store, at most, a few days, and then rewrite over it all.
Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?
What tweaking do you generally need to do for the camera server?
This is exactly what I do. I simply cloud backup any event/object clips but only retain last 5 days. The cloud is if law enforcement needs it, or in the event of hardware failure/catastrophic house damage.
Recording schedules change based on time of day/when we’re in/out of the house. This is all handled as automations through Home Assistant, but is set up through Surveillance Station NVR.
Just reporting back that I did the work last night to change the ingestion order for my cameras. I’m now using the
go2rtccomponent offrigateas the first ingestion point. That component is serving a restream to both Frigate and my NAS’ NVR. It’s working much better now, with less frame delay, and less CPU usage on the NAS.If doing CPU-based motion analysis, you could use a lower quality stream (if available from the cameras to avoid transcoding load) for motion detection, then use that to trigger recording on a higher quality stream.
This is exactly what I do. Record at 15FPS, event detection at 5FPS (at quarter resolution too).
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Brilliant idea! Thank you for the suggestion!
Whyd do you specifically mention CPU-based motion analysis? Does this idea not work with the Google Coral TPU, for example?
I’m using ZoneMinder on my end with more rudimentary motion detection, hence CPU detection. (My current hardware is pre-IOMMU on the mobo, so no pci passthrough for me…)
That said, if you have hardware that can handle X (via CPU, GPU, TPU, etc), then you gotta decide how you want to spend that. Whether resources are spent more in analysis fps or evaluating higher detail frames is up to what you need.