Two in one afternoon?!
@Zack-45Drives is back again, sharing his thoughts and experience with Frigate NVR.
What are you using for your surveillance capturing? Anything different? Feel free to create your own topic, and share your experience. Questions, comments and curiosities, as always, are welcomed.
Why I chose Frigate
by Zack Perry
Frigate is an open-source, real-time object detection system for security cameras. It integrates well with Home Assistant and provides users with real-time video analysis and notifications.
After researching a few different applications (Zoneminder, Shinobi, iSpy, etc) I ultimately chose Frigate due to how well it’s documented and how active the community and developers are
Frigate gives me peace of mind that while I’m not home that I’ll have views of the outside and inside of my home. Should an event occur, like any good security & surveillance tool, I will receive an alert. occurs
That all being said, when it came to my deployment in my homelab, it had a few extra layers than it needed—which added to the overall complexity Proxmox host, with a Rocky 8 VM hosting my docker containers). Without using a Coral TPU for object detection at the time, and not passing through any additional hardware, trying to set all of this up for the first time was a bit daunting. Eventually, however, it all started falling into place.
Frigate also has excellent documentation on installation, deployment, various camera integrations and more to make the process much easier
One of the things that surprised me with Frigate was that, despite my set-up’s limited hardware resources, the Object detection worked very well without additional hardware—this gave the added benefit of a very minimal storage footprint. This was a side project for me, and something I pursued on my own to solve the challenge of having a reliable, open source application to monitor my home while away. The overall administration of this tool is incredibly easy, and it doesn’t require a lot of time.