I'm working on getting rid of my Nest cameras around the house and trying to figure out my best option for an NVR. I really only have need/want for 2 cameras right now. One is the doorbell, and another is just a camera pointed at my back door/garage doors. I've already replaced the doorbell with a Reolink, and the other one is on the list for replacement soon.
As far as hardware I currently have the following possible landing places for Frigate(or other software):
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q with an i5-7500T
- This currently has a Proxmox with:
- Linux Mint VM (running Jellyfin inside here)
- Several other LXCs (adguard, docker, tailscale etc)
- This currently has a Proxmox with:
- Lincplus Lincstation N2 NAS running Truenas
- This currently has Immich running as an app
I don't really need a ton of long term storage or video or anything. A few days would be more than enough, especially if I am able to get some smart alerts through Home Assistant as well.
I have thought about buying another mini pc of some form and dedicating it to Frigate because I understand it can be a bit resource hungry, but I don't really know for sure if that is necessary. Another option along those lines would be to just buy a Reolink NVR.
I have also thought about moving Jellyfin to an LXC and passing the intel igpu to Jellyfin there. And then I could run Frigate inside of Docker? Do I understand that I could then share the igpu between Jellyfin and Docker/Frigate?
I know this is all kinda scattered. I feel like I almost have too many possible options and I don't know which one is best these days.
Frigate is painful to set up. It won't just go out and query the onvif capabilities so you have to try and figure out its RTSP url manually and ptz support is primitive. Its low resource and stable once you manage to get it to work.
Blue Iris is much easier and more capable, but uses Windows, and its a resource hog, and its paid. But if you get past that, BI is really good.