Hello everyone,
I have a few questions about Frigate and security cameras, and I thought this would be a good place to ask.
I’m new to security cameras and Frigate, so please excuse any basic questions I might have.
I have a PC at home with an i7-8700 CPU running Proxmox, where I plan to install Frigate in an LXC container for device passthrough.
I came across this Amcrest camera on Amazon: Amcrest IP5M-B1276EW-AI. Since Amcrest is recommended, I assume it should work well, but I’d like to confirm before purchasing. If you have any camera recommendations in the $60 range, I’d appreciate them.
I also read that having dual network interfaces is recommended. My router doesn’t support creating new subnets (I don’t know if that would be a problem), and my PC currently has only one network interface. My initial plan was to get a PoE switch and connect the cameras and the router to it, but would getting a separate PCIe network card, and then connect my PC to the switch instead of the router work for creating a separate, internet-less network?
Lastly, I understand that using a Coral accelerator is highly recommended. I’m deciding between the $25 PCIe version and the $60 USB version. Does Frigate benefit from the more expensive USB Coral, or is the $25 PCIe version sufficient? My motherboard is a Gigabyte B365M DS3H, in case that’s relevant.
Thanks in advance for your help!
You must log in or register to comment.
I use the pcie coral and it works fine with plenty of processing to spare although I believe mine coast e closer to $50. I have 6 amcrest PoE cameras. You should just buy a PoE switch and directly connect all cameras to it. Then link that directly to your frigate box and lock down access. Any amcrest camera should work well with frigate. I believe they all support rtsp protocol.
My frigate box is a PC which only has one ethernet port, so I should buy a separate network card in order to do that, right? I was thinking of buying a 2.5gb card anyways.
Yeah I would suggest buying another NIC. They’re cheap, its good security, and it opens up another port upstream for other uses.
If you can use the openvino stuff, you can skip the coral.
I actually saw a performance improvement moving from the coral to the openvino/iGPU, amusingly enough.
I could do that, but I don’t know if the iGPU of my i7 8700 is good enough. Even then, if it means taking load off my CPU I think it would be worth it.
8th gen is perfectly fine; it’s the same GMA 630 that’s in my 10850k which is doing 4 cameras without even breaking a sweat.
I might try this then. How do you run openvino, is it included in the docker container, or is it external?
Just a configuration option for Frigate, https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/object_detectors/
Other than picking that type, I don’t think I had to make any other configuration changes as I was already passing the iGPU through to the container for hardware acceleration.
(As a side note, even with openvino, 4 cameras using the hardware decoding, AND jellyfin transcodes, the iGPU basically sits at 5% usage. The openvino stuff is shockingly efficient.)
I put a passively cooled GT1030 in mine and its doing the decoding & tensorrt detection for 4x 1080p cameras just fine, based on its current load I expect I could add another 4.
I couldn’t tell you if that specific Amcrest camera will work, but I have 2 of the recommended ones on the frigate docs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083G9KT4C/) and they work.