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.

  • Kalcifer@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    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.

    You will also want some form of reliable storage for your clips

    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.

    as well as the ability to back up those clips/shots to the cloud somewhere.

    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.

    I’m personally running 4 cameras (3x1080 @ 15fps, 1x4k @ 25fps) through my ~7 year old Synology DS418play NAS

    Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?

    whereas I can tweak stuff on Surveillance Station quite easily.

    What tweaking do you generally need to do for the camera server?

    • m1st3r2@butts.internationalEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?

      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.

    • trankillity@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

      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.

      What tweaking do you generally need to do for the camera server?

      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.

    • trankillity@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Just reporting back that I did the work last night to change the ingestion order for my cameras. I’m now using the go2rtc component of frigate as 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.