12 mo. ago • 100%

What NVR Do You Run?

Looking to change up my blue iris install to something more free. I’m going to be recording my house, my mother’s house and my in laws house all using tailscale. I planned on using frigate, even bought a Coral TPU for the human detection and a better motion detection. (At least I think it makes it better?) But not sure if this changed, I saw that frigate and TOU doesn’t do well in a VM (proxmox for me).

So two things:

Curious what you run/suggest
If you run frigate on a vm with a coral, how did pass through work?

Total between all houses, I’ll have 14 cameras recording off the bat, might add a few more over the years. I also have a gpu to handle the encoding and plenty of storage. Their upload speeds are ok too and my download speeds can handle it.

Thanks!

45 comments

Like others have mentioned, Frigate with a Coral on a SFF pc is working out great for me.

3
Frigate with coral.

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I’m running Frigate in an LXC on Proxmox. It works pretty well.

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- Using coral?
  
  1
  
  Yep. Passed through the Coral to the LXC
  
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I am running Zoneminder. I have played with Frigate and it is not really production ready. And Zoneminder, while not fancy, works every time and has some of the best still pictures of anything out there. I will keep looking at the next new thing, but I am not shutting off Zoneminder until something is solidly batter.

2
- I been using zoneminder for over a decade now and inertia is such a thing.
  
  I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, maybe techie friends, but it is so hard to configure.
  
  I am about upgrade to a new ZM based on Rocky 9.
  
  I do run 40 monitors, I use substreams and link to the main stream. Home assistant had sensors that can trigger alerts, wrote my own front end to quickly move from scene to scene and to accommodate more than 6 monitors.
  
  I still have yet to master capturing video outdoors. It misses some stuff, but I have a backup video on other systems.
  
  Also would like to look at some of the ML stuff.
  
  I am going to reduce the amount of cameras though. After 10 years it is time to get rid of the BNC cameras.
  
  2
  
  I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, maybe techie friends, but it is so hard to configure.
  
  I hear ya, but some of the new stuff is worse! It will get better, but then there is the next hurdle; stability. Zoneminder can run for months with no baby sitting... Other stuff, not so much. But I keep watching, and hoping!
  
  1
I run Milestone XProtext. It's not free if you have more than 8 cameras, but it's rock solid and has the best NVR mobile app I've ever seen (the mobile app also supports connections to multiple servers)

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- So you could have multiple servers each with 8 cameras? And just switch between them on the app.
  
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  Devs hate this one trick
  
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Ran Scrypted for most of this year. Just switched back to Blue Iris. Running CodeProject.ai with google coral, but also have frigate for the home assistant integration and might take the time to dial in sending motion alerts from frigate to BI to get rid of CP.ai

1
- Scrypted is under appreciated. Getting the AppleTV to do facial recognition against your photos app, and then storing clips for free in iCloud is magical.
  
  It’s the only cloud-based camera storage solution I trust.
  
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  I was paying for 8 camera licenses for the NVR piece and can say it is too expensive for what it is. Not upset at all that I gave money to the dev, but can't pay that much for an NVR every year. Blue Iris is still right on that line of too much for a self hosted solution when frigate is getting as good as it is, but mobile experience is smoother than anything else I've used, even if the UI is way too old at this point
  
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I tried frigate on an Ubuntu server VM with coral and it did not work at all. coral kept getting frozen. The pass through sucks.

If you can, run LXC or bare metal. I recommend Ubuntu server 20.04 (not 22.04) because it has the right python compatibility.

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- frigate in a vm with gpu pass thru works perfectly.
  
  1
  
  oh that's really interesting - I didn't even think of doing that. I should have clarified, USB pass through did not work for me, but I did not try GPU.
  
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- Interesting, I have the same setup (Ubuntu vm + passthrough) and it's been steady since I got the python version issues resolved
  
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Tried shinobi and no matter what I did, I couldn't get the shm partition to be larger.

Tried frigate with telsa p4 and it absolutely would not use gpu encoding. I wanted to try the gpu object detection, but didn't even make it that far.

Tried frigate with 8th Gen Intel igpu, also wouldn't use hardware transcode so didn't make it to object detection.

Now I just use synology surveillance station. I am going to be adding a 3rd and 4th camera, so I will probably have to try my luck again with something else because I don't want to fork out for the license.

1
- Why don't you just get the Coral TPU? The price is $69-79 on Amazon.
  
  I was on the same boat except for no GPU or iGPU pass-through. I tried Shinobi, but I got too many artifacts. Motioneye was too CPU hungry and no audio. Zoneminder was the only one that worked for me, but the motion is kind of hard to calibrate.
  
  A year ago, I purchased the USB Coral TPU and setup Frigate. So far, Frigate is the best I have tried. The only missing piece is continuous recording. I want to do the setup that I had with Zoneminder, where I could chain a continuous recording at the lowest resolution. Then, if motion is detected, Motion record at the highest resolution.
  
  2
Running scrypted. It works great.

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- I have Scrypted stood up for testing. Do you record using it too?
  
  1
Vigi NVR. For Tapo IP cameras.

1
I have never heard of Frigate until a week ago now I cannot stop seeing it on Reddit. Weird how that works.

1
Frigate with a PCIe Google Coral. Frigate running in a docker container inside a VM. Pass through both layers working perfectly fine.

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Synology

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- Their licenses are so expensive it's incredible
  
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  It is a one time payment and you can carry it over from device to devices. It is also not locked to a camera. And no monthly fee. After a couple of years you end up saving more if you do not replace a camera. Just the cost of power and spare HDD for when they eventually need replaced.
  
  1
  
  It's a trade off -- you can use very inexpensive cameras. With something like UniFi you pay for the license with the camera.
  
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Digital watchdog, Frigate, and Unifi Protect

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- What do you use DW for? The cameras or their NVR? My FIL has it at his business and he has problems
  
  1
  
  I use it for the NVR with RTSP streams from Unifi or onvif setup directly from Hikvision cameras. Haven’t had any problems what’s up?
  
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Running AgentDVR. used to use the docker container but moved to a machine with a GPU now so I get hardware encoded streams

Even better combination with Home Assistant and one of the local AI providers

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Blueiris with code project at multiple locations

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- Code Project looks cool
  
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If you run frigate in an lxc container on proxmox you should be able to use any device visible to the host without worrying about pass through

I myself have frigate running on docker running on unraid virtualised under proxmox with a gpu passed through and it works like a dream a

1
Just dumped Blue Iris for Frigate this week. Running Frigate in LXC on Proxmox with coral and qsv passthrough. Frigate was easier to set up and configure than expected. Been running rock solid for 4 days now.

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- Did you run into issues with the passthrough of Coral?
  
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  No. Straight forward
  
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