I've been running Frigate for more than two years now and it beats the hell out of any system I've tried in terms of detection speed and reliability. For context, I've tried Ring, Tapo cameras, and also Eufy security. Today I have turned away from all the cameras except for the Tapo cameras now serving RTSP streams into my Frigate instance. I have also blocked them from accessing the internet and that gave it complete privacy by default.
Eufy Security started showing advertisements about their new products whenever I tap on a motion detected notification. They prioritize their ads over your own security which is ridiculous. Not just that, some of their clips stored in their cloud storage would never open despite the fact I used to pay them my membership fees every month. They were also caught storing passwords and other security credentials in plain text. Thanks to them, they were the primary motivation for me to move away from using those proprietary platforms and look for something self-hosted.
I got Frigate running on my old hardware with hardware acceleration enabled via RX 550 GPU and detection is always under one second. I wrote a small app that uses Frigate API to grab screenshots and send me notifications via Telegram and Pushover. It's been very self-sustainable for two years now. I only had to restart the service two times in all of this time. I am also using some tunneling from my VPS into the locally hosted Frigate running on my home server and it's just been flawless. Thanks to this amazing project.
Do you know of any good Soup-To-Nuts tutorial "for dummies" on such a setup? Finally getting some secure home monitoring/automation has bubbled up as a priority and I've started looking at Home Assistant but even for someone with some technical background the learning curve combined with the sheer breadth of options is overwhelming.
How did you get the Tapo cameras to play nice in rtsp mode with frigate? I found that even one camera did horrible things to the wifi. Even with one camera per AP per band, they caused trouble.
Note that the WiFi chips on these devices are not so great, they need good coverage. I run two Asus routers in mesh network mode to get good coverage and never had any issues with anything
What is your approach to keeping these cameras off the Internet, but still on your local network to ensure they're not backchanneling with your awareness?
All IoT devices on my network go into a VLAN that blocks internet access. Using Unifi, I think it's just a checkbox to turn internet access on/off. I use a virtual nic on my Home Assistant VM that recognizes that vlan and can communicate with all those devices, as well as a separate nic which is hooked up to the main vlan.
In my router admin page, there is something called parental control. I used it to disable internet access for all the cameras. I've also used the DHCP settings to give all the cameras static IPs as well.
Dedicated VLAN. Firewall rule forbids all outgoing connections from camera VLAN, even to other LAN, but allows inbound from designated devices on a privileged VLAN (this way random devices on my network can’t talk to the cameras). Frigate is on a VM that is so designated.
I do DHCP reservations then firewall rules. Not as safe as a VLAN but not aware of any devices assigning themselves random IPs outside the DHCP reservation to circumvent it
Easier than getting VLANs working across switches and APs
yes. You have to go into the Eufy mobile app and enable RTSP for each camera you have registered. Assign the camera a static IP and add a password there. Then use that in your frigate config yaml to setup the stream. Including go2rtc.
Your go2rtc url should look something like this and it will display that url in the camera configuration in the app itself.
I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your videofeeds in the first place?
Like, I remember thinking the GNU guys were hippie crackpots. But it was like 15 years ago and I have forgot how to relate to that feeling... it is like realizing all my colleagues are not using adblockers and visit sites with ads. I just can't understand.
> I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your videofeeds in the first place?
In my case, I received a ring doorbell as a gift. I ran it for several years and replaced it with Reolink on a vlan.
Well to be fair I've used some silly and expensive Meater Plus thermometer that needed an Android app just because I got is as a gift from my father in law and wanted to be able to at least tell him I used it.
It is hard to turn down present with "it will spy on me" when ordinary people think a thermometer can't. But I am quite sure I would refuse to install a SaaS CCTV.
> In August of 2017, a supervisor discovered what the employee was doing only "after the supervisor noticed that the male employee was only viewing videos of 'pretty girls,'" the complaint alleges. That employee was terminated, the filing says.
Phew -- I am definitely not a "pretty girl".
Seriously, though, I'm glad that I ditched Ring and that it only pointed at my walkway.
Not to nitpick but you're only really guaranteed privacy unless you know there's only a wired connection. If it has wifi the camera could hop onto a nearby open network and do whatever it wanted without your knowledge, assuming evil enough firmware
You can't know there's only a wired connection unless you open the camera up and inspect the PCB for an antenna, and it could still be disguised. However, by "I've only given it access to a specific network" you already eliminate 99.99% of the problem. The other 0.01% isn't really worth worrying about.
I know what you're referring to (that wifi will be so cheap and fit in a single chip that it will just phone home on open networks anyway. This was a prediction for smart TVs a few years ago) , but I think if that day comes, the devices will be easily detected and defeated by cutting the antenna or taping foil around them.
And if you're worried about threat actors on the level of backdoor/compromised firmware, the last thing you should be doing is using TP-Link Tapo cameras.
TP-Link Tapo cameras (or any other cheap cams) are fine. As long you take necessary steps to prevent leaking or calling home. I have a mix of both tapo and eufy. All of them isolated via VLAN with router FW rules set to block all traffic. The only time I had to use anything connected externally is when I had to setup each camera using the Eufy or tplink mobile apps. But once they were added to VLAN isolated wireless network, I never had to ever use the mobile app. (Unless I specifically update the firmware that addressed a problem)
Assuming visitors know what NVR stands for seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption, but even if they don't I think there's enough context for someone to still understand what Frigate is.
Usually I would agree with you, but this is an incredibly common initialism, used by not just people in the industry, but also by consumers. Sure, it may not be as widespread as VHS (global) or API (tech-adjacent), but anyone who is in the market for this software already knows what NVR means.
Most people would know the term from either being quoted or looking up CCTV solutions, all of which, unless they're fully "cloud-based", come with a component that is called the NVR. You wouldn't even consider this if you weren't aware of the concept. If NVR means nothing to you, Network Video Recorder doesn't mean anything to you either. This is meant to be a replacement for closed and inflexible hardware boxes that are sold together with security cameras, and the name of those boxes are "NVRs".
NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit.
And there XVR wich can combine both Network and Digital cameras
Which is odd because the first time I heard the term DVR was in the late 1990's, referring to the box that was used to record TV signals digitally for playback and/or ad-skipping. The term distinguished it from things such as VCRs, which recorded in analog, on tape. Those DVRs were, in fact, digital.
If the recorder uses digital video as its storage, it's a real DVR, even if the video input is that weird HD variant of NTSC that's everywhere in security cameras
As a video professional, with many devices for recording video both at baseband and via ip, and responsible for delivering audio and video streams via networks to tens of millions of people, I had no idea what “NVR” meant.
I don’t believe video professional equates to security professional. Would not expect someone who is a video professional to know NVR but at the same time if you don’t know what an NVR is I would not expect someone to be using this software. The entry point into this space is an NVR.
Niche term yes but if you don’t know what an NVR is you probably don’t want to go down the road of Frigate. It is a lot more common than you might think these are traditionally deployed in most small biz.
Sorry you took offense. I believe in a thread about initialism that some forms are expected based on the nature of the content. And specifically in this case, I am not sure what a video professional has to do with someone who works in security. So no I don’t need to stop and to be frank if you don’t know what a NVR is Frigate is most likely not a great solution but it also might be and you will learn a lot!
Please consider that we're not all English-speaking, and that such terms may be unknown to people who aren't from your culture, even if we do understand your language. CCTV could mean "China Central TeleVision" for instance ;-)
In the context of surveillance cameras it is perfectly clear what CCTV stands for, and if it is an unknown to someone because they are not familiar with the english language it is also perfectly reasonable to just force them to look it up like they would any other english word they are unfamiliar with.
Acronyms are not the same as the English language as they are not words by themselves but compressions. "Closed-circuit television" is self-evident to a reader; CCTV isn't. And "in the context", yes, but readers are not necessarily experts in their fields. This is why many news publications usually expand acronyms.
So to be clear, I think that it would make sense for Frigate to define NVR the first time they use it on their site. However, this isn't a news publication and I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect any serious visitor to the Frigate site to be expert enough to know what an NVR is.
Hard disagree. I've just started looking at some home monitoring and was extremely frustrated by this assumption because literally everyone assumes you already know. Home Assistant documentation uses it, frigate's home page uses it, pages like this use it. It's not ubiquitous enough in the vernacular to simply be a proper noun (eg nobody cares that "LASER" is an acronym).
I finally had to look it up on Wikipedia so I could understand what they were even referring to and "Network Video Recorder" was much clearer as to what the component was. Overall it creates barrier to entry where everyone operates on the assumption that you're only shopping because you're already a customer.
But the site is for software managing... CCTV solutions.
I didn't know what NVR meant either but it seems reasonable for Frigate to assume 90% of the people coming across their site would be given the context.
Disagree. I would expect 90% or more of the folks coming to Frigate would know what an NVR is. Would be nice to define all things definitely but NVR seems table stakes knowledge to even consider using Frigate.
So what? Like I said it does not hurt to define but at the same time if you don’t know what NVR stands for, Frigate is not for you. It’s like reading an equity research paper and complaining EPS is not defined. Some things just don’t need to be defined and if you don’t know, you most likely are not the target audience.
You are missing the point. It has been considered general English language competency that you always expand the first instance of any abbreviation that is not absolutely obvious in context, e.g., USA, “e.g.”, or CIA, unless you happen to be writing about the Culinary Institute of America in most contexts outside of the culinary context.
It is a rather annoying myopic perspective I most often run across in tech, where technical people for whatever reason are so fixated on their little corner that they are either unaware or simply indifferent to the fact that there are others in the world, and that if they want to spread their work and impact, they need to make things approachable and lower barriers to entry.
It Is why the rule of general language proficiency exists in English especially because of all the abbreviations, to facilitate information and knowledge sharing.
Let’s all improve by going through whatever our project is and make sure that at least in the context, abbreviations are easily understood by expanding them, e.g., your introduction/overview page and documentation should always expand most first instance abbreviations, including in separate, high level segments (e.g., if you have different first contact pages or objects) unless they are globally known to society.
It’s really not any different than any other “sales” tactic; you will not be successful selling something if you do not first describe what it does in a one-liner. Ask yourself, “who is the person I want/need to come to this thing and should I assume they would know what this all means?”
What I'm arguing is that in the context of CCTV (Closed-circuit television) systems, NVR is a universal term.
I would also argue that the expansion of "e.g." is not "absolutely obvious". I know what it means ("for example"), but I had to google it to know it's an abbreviation of "exempli gratia", and I don't speak Latin, so I don't even know exactly what that means without reading further.
In the same way, you can also quickly understand from the page what an NVR is without knowing the exact expansion.
I have no real conclusion here, but sort of land on the side of "Why wouldn't you expand it?"
The abbreviation of e.g. isn't a good example. It is hundreds of years old and taught in schools. It is essentially a feature of the language (or at least of writing the language) and can hardly be compared to the far more recent initialism NVR. It is ubiquitous and all native English speakers should know it and all non-native English speakers should learn it.
VCR is an example that is almost always referred to solely as its initialism. However, this became a completely ubiquitous term. Early advertisements didn't say "VCR", they said things like "video recorder"[0]. Once it was ubiquitous non-specialists knew what a VCR was even if they didn't understand the initialism and they were marketed just as "VCR". One could make the case that "VCR" stopped being a pure initialism and become more of a word. (VHS on the other hand... not expanded in that video.)
Is NVR ubiquitous enough? BestBuy sells them without expanding the initialism (in the examples I checked), so maybe. However, I bet if you sampled people, the majority wouldn't be able to tell you. And BestBuy selling them this way may have more to do with limited 'item title' space.
It might be the case that it is well-enough known among people who 'need to know' like security folks. I'd argue that's probably not meaningful if BestBuy is retailing them to the public.
Maybe a better example is something like an air-admittance valve (AAV). Most people have never heard of it, but all plumbers have heard of it. In context, anyone can probably figure out what it does. And yet Oatey "correctly" (according to style rules) identifies the name and puts the initialism in parentheses[1].
So on the one hand, it may be ubiquitous enough that it doesn't matter (and is becoming more of a word). On the other hand, there's evidence here that it does matter because it isn't ubiquitous enough for people to be comfortable not knowing what the acronym means.
What I can't see is the downside of writing "network video recorder (NVR)" on the first instance of is use at least on the landing page. Everyone has to learn what it means somewhere and it seems like a missed marketing opportunity for it to not be through your product's landing page. It may also reduce friction or aid in SEO. (YMMV, but I get quite different results searching for "network video recorder" and "NVR".)
You're defending expanding these terms (which I agree to some point), but then writing 'e.g.', 'YMMV' and 'SEO' which you could have expanded or replaced by more obvious constructions like 'for example', 'your mileage may vary' and 'search engine optimization'.
NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit. And there XVR with can combine both Network and Digital cameras
It‘s still a bit flaky getting video acceleration (not talking about object detection but video decoding) working but after that it is one of the best solutions for live object detection I‘ve ever tried: no more small animals waking me up in the night.
P.S.: I‘m also supporting them with a yearly? subsciption to train the „A.I.“ model against false positives I provide which increased the accuracy even more.
This is becoming a real problem because the drivers/software for the Coral AI boards is yet another example of Google Abandonware(tm) which has a hard dependency on a Paleolithic-era version of Python. Comically, the hardware is still sold.
In so many words if you expect to use the Coral boards you are stuck on EOL versions of Debian/Ubuntu - which have terribly old video drivers and missing kernel GPU support. There's a good chance your modern GPU - even well-supported Intel ones - won't work.
Imagine buying new hardware in 2025 whose software still required Windows 7.
It's fine, you're not running a network-accessible part of the service on unpatched software. The only input this part of the software requires is trusted configuration data and a video feed which could hypothetically be malicious, but then the question becomes why you're running an adversarial camera on your network, and why you're allowing it to connect to the internet to fetch latest exploits and C&C instructions.
You can also transcode the video before feeding it to any outdated software and run it in a VM if you're paranoid.
Yes, it is, because then you aren’t stuck with a EOL distribution where you get even more security issues to deal with (vs. just EOL Python).
Also, what kind of “security exploits” would an outdated Python result in if the Python interpreter itself isn’t serving a network port or accepting arbitrary user input in general?
I assume Frigate itself isn’t running the web app on the same Python version - it’s likely just the Coral SDK that requires an outdated Python version.
Hedgehogs are fantastic TV - a member of my family used to get some great footage including one very memorable fight where one ended up rolling the other one around
Some nights my cat goes absolutely ballistic running from window to window to door, meowing and scratching to get out. And inevitably if I open my camera and look I'll see something like a family of racoons walking by or a skunk in the yard. It's a little consolation that he's just hearing other animals and isn't possessed by demons at 2am.
You can do both. You can set it to detect animals but turn off reviews. The reviews act like alerts you can "view" whereas the detection as more like metadata you can use on the search page
Been running about 2-3 years, was mostly fine before but now I get constant false positives from the children's garden toys, scooter left in the garden, pirate flag waving etc.
I don't submit false positives for privacy reasons but I'm looking at trainingy own model. I've got years worth of positives/negatives to train on.
That "subscription" is one which I gladly pay due to multiple reasons:
1. It supports the developers(s)
2. The price can be directly attributed to cost for training
3. You can keep the models you trained during your subscription indefinately
That's pretty much the opposite to AgentDVR. I don't need hosted services for remote access or push notifications - I can do that myself. But if I want to abide the license terms, I need to purchase a monthly subscription for remote access over my own VPN.
Looking in their github, it says that it uses openCV and Tensorflow. The motion detection is done with openCV and will be immune against any attack unless you move so slow that you are under the detection threshold.
Tensorflow for the object detection doesn't do any OCR thus written instructions dont work. However, according to the website the system has a limited list of objects it detects. So maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent detection.
I think the defaults are fairly sensitive. I had to add motion masks to ignore trees
In addition, if something else like a 2nd tree moves, then it will get sent to the detector which will potentially label the other thing (my trees were causing false positives because it thought the stationary fence post was a human)
With an open source model, though, a criminal may be able to work out a 2D image that he could print out that would identify him as a package or a windy branch.
the criminal could spend years to become a trusted maintainer so they can upload a model that's been fine tuned to ignore objects with a specific QR code.
Someone made a shirt called ChatGP-Tee, that had (IIRC) a picture of a generic office view, it confused the model completely and it didn't recognise the wearer as human :D
They have a two-stage approach, first motion detection with - I think - OpenCV and then afterwards object detection of zones of interest with different object detection models, depending on your hardware.
It supports Coral TPU, Halio Accelerator and most GPUs. I think AMD is still the worst, since ROCm is not available on iGPUs.
Afterwards, they provide/support models like edgedet (Coral), YOLO-NAS, YOLO, D-Fine or RF-DETR.
They also offer paid access to a specially trained version of YOLO-NAS where you can also train your own images.
This is worth mentioning but a GPU or TPU is not required if you have a small number of cameras and set up your detection zones right. I use a low resolution/framerate MJPEG substream for detection to reduce the amount of decoder effort and use h264 only for recording and viewing. Openvino is the recommended choice for CPU recognition and it's much faster than the default Tensorflow detector.
It only uses around 20% CPU on a 6 core VM (running on a Ivy Bridge Xeon) with two cameras.
Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
If you want to install them for later police work, that still seems tedious and you might require off-site backup. In public places we often have CCTV of people, but unless you have number signs on vehicles, they seem to not help with conviction rates by much.
One good reason for cameras. They promote civil behaviour.
Since I installed a visible security camera above my front door I never had couriers throwing packages, they very rarely not show up and claim "no one was home" and so on. Also I had a neighbour damage my fence every single time he was doing his farm work (plowing, harvesting). In addition he would use an unfenced portion of my property as a turning place leaving deep/huge tire marks and did other silly shit like that despite me asking him many times not to do it. Once I installed cameras it hasn't happened once.
Then there are other practical reasons, I can review the recordings to find out which way my cat went if he is gone for a long time, or I can check is he waiting in front of the door in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed. Also my cameras resolved a mystery how one of my cats got injured once (hint - deer really don't like cats).
Finally, let's say there is a huge storm forecast and I'm away. I can check remotely everything is fine.
Finally, cameras are very good for insurance purposes. At least in my country insurers are known to weasel they way out of paying very often. If you have an actual recording that is much more difficult for them to do.
The only issue I have with most reasonably priced Cctv cameras is that they go towards more megapixels when they should go towards more IR sensitivity. Almost every consumer grade camera can be defeated at night if a subject is moving quickly. The picture will be smeared. So for ID purposes I use lower resolution more "professional " cameras.
As for open source, I've been using ZoneMinder with local (and on camera) AI for ages.
Dunno much about the market for consumer grade home mount IR/Thermal cameras, I used to use upcycled industrial cameras when I worked contracts in the vision domain, recently I'm using a rifle scope on a remote controlled mount with a long HDMI cable.
> They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
Oh wow, I didn’t know I felt that way! I’m glad you were able to tell me what I feel.
You are making a lot of assumptions about why people have them.
People have different dispositions, live in different environments with different levels of support from law enforcement and face different threats. I live in a remote area and am regularly away for extended periods of time. I’ve spent years with and without any security cameras and I’m generally more content when I have a few keeping an eye on the place.
This! And also, cameras are not just useful to monitor criminal threats. If you’re away from a property for long periods of time, they are also helpful to monitor for weather damage, misdelivered packages, animal activity, etc.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I don't have cameras as a crutch for an anxiety disorder, I use them to solve property management problems. If there is something that needs to be addressed, I do so. This may or may not require my involvement depending on the issue. If a camera breaks (which isn't common), I order whatever parts that may be required if any, and fix it when convenient.
A broken camera gives you exactly the same information as a camera that doesn't exist: zero information. If this gives someone enough anxiety that they would need to drop everything, they probably need therapy.
I was wondering about the events you're monitoring home for while you're on holiday. Were you saying something more like cameras mean you don't have to do your usual rounds on foot?
Regardless, when I said "blank feed" I meant a scenareo where you're away and you don't know why the feed is blank. It's not the same as a non-existent camera: it's telling you there's a mysterious problem. Can you ignore the chance that it's an extremely urgent problem?
The cameras that people have on their homes are not necessarily places that they are at on a regular basis. Some homes are vacant, some are secondary homes, some are vacation homes, some are rentals, etc.
I've had a couple failures over the past ~decade and it has never been "mysterious". If you don't panic and use context clues, there is always plenty of information. Pretty much any foreseeable urgent problem resulting in a failure would have produced some footage that indicates the issue. And non-urgent problems that result in failure are easy to detect. (e.g. if your UPS sends you an on-battery alert, and 5 minutes later your cameras fail, you just had a power outage)
The only time that cameras go black without warning and it is warranted to panic is when you're the comic relief character in a bad horror movie.
I don't see courtesy or an answer in your comment. I see a refusal to answer, in a condescending tone. I explained myself in good faith and you chose to educate me about the existence of property portfolios, following up with how, actually, my question is stupid.
You refused to accept even the premise of any thing I've said. I believe I have matched your respect, but hopefully with more zing.
When the doorbell rings I get a notification on my desktop and phone with a relevant image captured a few moments before the button was pressed.
Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my pants on for.
Mostly it's just fun and easy to add cameras around your house. Then you can do stuff like have the LLM count birds it sees or ask it "are the dogs in the back yard" etc.
The one pointed at the driveway sends an alert to my phone when someone visits. It's handy because I can't hear the house from my office so I often don't realize when we have guests over.
The one in my back yard is for security. I don't obsess over it, but if something went missing from my workshop I'd check the recordings. I'm not worried about traditional thieves, but I've got a couple unsavory family members.
> Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them?
The point of Frigate et. al. is to not have to do the monitoring. The false positives of small wildlife, known persons/vehicles, etc. do not consume attention, so you forget about it until something of actual interest happens.
Like with all home automation, you should use it to solve problems you have, not problems you want to have.
Here are some ways I use security cameras:
Check if my colleagues are in the office or not (and if they are in the middle of a live recording). Check on my plants while I'm away. Check if there is a free parking space. Check if I left something at home or in the office.
I'm not really thinking about crime, even though they are called 'security cameras'.
I'm so happy those uses of camera's are illegal in the EU.
Camera's at work can only used for safety. You could have other - less intrusive - systems in place for all tge other issues.
You have to justify the use of storing (or publishing, don't remember) content that includes PII. You must register the use of cameras and specify how long and why you store those recordings. Which usually states: For security purposes. You must include (at least my country) a sticker that says particular area under surveillance.
When there is collective photographing at school for children, we as parents must consent with a signature... which is a little bit annoying.
Only if the camera is angled in such a way that it only sees your property. A door bell camera that can also see the public road in front your house for example is technically not allowed, even if most people ignore that rule.
I don’t get it, you have privacy at home or outside work, why when someone is paying you to work for them there is an expectation of privacy? You don’t see how that is extremely counterproductive for capitalism and economic activity?
Just don’t come to work right? You can have all the privacy you want? Or don’t visit the business if you are the customer.
Please help me understand what the logic and justification is to regulate and control security camera use within private enterprises (with the obvious exception of toilets and changing rooms etc)?
My employee can intrude on my privacy when he had probable cause but only then. Otherwise it is illegal to collect personal data. I need mutual trust to be productieve and evaluation of my work should always be upfront and transparant.
Otherwise I'm puzzled by your claim of productivity. Especially since we are stalking about labour productivity.
Notice that the top tier of the list is populated by countries with strict privacy laws.
> “There is a fundamental shift in how nations approach economic output. Strong social policies and strategic investment in worker well-being are creating more productive economies than traditional long-hour work cultures. The financial sector remains a key driver of high productivity, but it’s the emphasis on work-life balance that distinguishes the leading economies."
I work from home half of the time.
I have clear targets. Some I set for my team, some are set for me. If I reach or surpass my targets, why should I be spied on constantly?
This is about security cameras at work sites and businesses. What does this have to do with WFH?
However while we are on the topic I don’t see why governments should impose any restrictions on businesses using monitoring systems on their WFH technology systems as long as it is disclosed to the employees they may be monitored.
When you are paid by an employer your job is to do exactly what they want and try to do it well. Your relationship is voluntary (at will) between both parties and if you don’t like it then don’t work for them.
You were mentioning productivity as a reason for motoring your every move at work. Productivity is not a valid reason.
The reason the can't use video footage is because your image is biometric data.
There are other ways of monitoring at the workplace without being so privacy invasive.
My team is set free. We don't have work hours. Technically we have to work 3 hours a day, between 10:00 and 12:00 and between 13:00 and 14:00.
Without any monitoring they've reached their yearly target in may of this year.
So productivity is a falsehood. Nobody works harder when they're watched. People work hard when they are valued.
Fair performance reviews now and then do the job.
Then back on safety. I used to work in a bar years ago. It was in a busy part of the city and out of 30+ bars on the square I was the last to close.
I had 3 cameras and they were installed for my safety. Imagery was erased every morning and only used when needed after a bar fight or theft. That's fair use.
Never use biometric data lightly.
On a sidenote. I just don't get why people want to live in a surveillance state so much. You can't build a society without trust.
You can integrate it with home assistant to send notification on your phone (or run any other automation) when it detects any specified objects.
I have set it to send me notification if any person is detected in my front yard, drive way or back yard after I have "armed" my alarm at night. I am thinking of also sounding am alarm on my home speakers.
Frigate, when configured properly, has a really low false positive rate. I have only seen 2-3 false positives in the past one year. And if rarely ever misses. So it's something you can rely on.
We had a couple of minor break-ins in our neighborhood, and subsequently installed 3 very visible cameras along the neighborhood road (which is a dead end). No break-ins since.
My neighbor used his to catch a guy that let his dog poop all over the sidewalk. Like a trail of 10 poops over 6 meters. When caught days later he denied it, but the neighbor whipped out his phone and showed him the video. He apologized.
Most satisfying ise of CCTV ever. NGL it made me want to install them.
>Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them?
Very few people rarely ever actively monitor their home security cameras these days. I only look at the recorded footage if and only when a predefined event is triggered. Usually if a person is detected within a specific area when I'm not at home and they shouldn't be there. Such as door leading into the house from the backyard. Or if a package is delivered and I don't see the package on my doorstep.
In my previous apartment, the landlady had zero sense of decency and would let herself in to snoop around.
I use these devices because I can factually know that nobody has entered my home while I was gone. It is peace of mind. I don't think about burglaries or whatever. I think about how my landlord or a property manager or rotating cast of anonymous maintenance people have a key and the only reason they don't abuse it is because of decency.
I get notifications when packages are delivered which limits the window for porch pirates.
I have a daily news feed of animal activity so I can see what the little neighborhood cats, raccoons, and skunks were up to last night. I was originally using it to alert me when the neighborhood stray was on the back porch so I could come down and feed her (without risking other critters finding the food)
I am installing a doorbell one this week. I got a package delivered monday according to the tracker but its not here. It would be nice to have had the camera already so I could see if someone took the package or if its still potentially not yet delivered. Neighbors have gotten packages stolen plenty so it is a real risk.
I live at 7400 ft in Colorado and only lock my doors so the bears don't come in. I have cameras on each side of the house so I know when not to let my dogs out.
I would love to ditch things like locking car, home, hiding stuff, etc, but unfortunately there are individuals (a way less than 0.2% of people) that makes us to…
>> Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt insecurity.
I am fascinated by this whole thread because I have multiple cameras trying to capture hummingbirds, coyotes, and foxes in my backyard. We try to ring an alert when they come so we can quickly run to the window and be inspired by their grace and beauty.
Currently i'm doing this via a very flimsy RPI+webcam setup but i'd like something much better. I also have FLIR cams because im interested to do this with night vision also.
I'll take this a step further. I don't understand why so many people are installing security cameras at all. And my observation has been that there's often an inverse correlation between how much someone needs such a camera and how likely they are to have one. It's always the suburbanites who are talking about their Ring cam footage and freaking out that someone's at the door, oh wait, it's just FedEx.
Despite what most people seem to think, crimes like break ins in the US are extremely rare. Why do people still feel the need to gear up their homes like Fort Knox?
It's not for deterring break-ins. It's just for informational purposes like seeing when my package is dropped off. FedEx might be pretty good at sending me emails about deliveries but plenty of other smaller last-mile couriers don't have any way of notifying me. It's also for entertaining purposes like seeing a feral cat stretch in my front yard.
Frigate has really done a fantastic job packing everything together.
For basic needs go2rtc [0] or MediaMTX [1] can be enough.
But once you need some form of intelligence on top AFAIK unfortunately there is no unixiy tool that can take a stream and easily define and apply a model on it. You will have to code something in python.
I am using Motion [0] since years. At least for basic stuff, is easy to configure and very flexible. For more advanced configuration, it required a bit of tuning.
Yes motion is amazing and has been around for a quarter of a century ! very lightweight and reliable.
As far as I know you can do object detection and tracking by gluing it with a yolo model using a few lines of python like this [0].
I saw a bunch of people doing this.
I really wish there was a more unixy tool available in package managers doing this.
Exactly.
Motion can detect objects in the images, but not recognize the object type, but it's easy to integrate with a third party services like the one that you are linking with the scripts features [0].
I have personally integrated with S3 and self-hosted notification to create a small CCTV system, but there is no limit to the imagination of possible integrations.
I run Frigate with 5 IP cameras (3 Hikvisions, 2 Amcrests) and 1 USB camera. I'm using a USB Coral TPU, which does a good enough job that Frigate can keep up with an average of only 30% CPU usage on an old Dell with 4 core i7-6700.
Frigate's better than anything else I tried, but not perfect. As mentioned in another thread, it has some issues with codecs from some cameras (playing clips from Amcrests is fine, Hikvisions not so much) and therefore you may need to transcode. Also it has no built in option for sending your recorded clips offsite; theoretically you could mirror its storage directory, but as far as I've found it's not organized in a way that you can separate just important events.
> Turn on face recognition & upload your first face via Face Library → Add Face.
> Train and improve accuracy: New detections appear in Face Library → Train with a confidence score-assign each to a new or existing person to refine future recognition.
I also ran Doublestake and Compreface with Frigate. Found out that it didn't really provide any benefits for me. The default native person detection in Frigate using the TPU is more than adequate. I've seen some interesting stuff people have done using a mix of locally hosted LLM vision model with Home Assistant and Frigate to do image interpretation. Including facial recognition and License plate reader. It's something I want to eventually explore.
Where would I start if I wanted to do stuff on a video, but not necessarily live? Like, say I have a 5h video and want to extract the frames of each car passing when it's at a certain spot, for instance. Or all of those with a driver holding a phone or whatever. Are there good frameworks for this, or would I have to split the video into a million frames and run something on each one?
I'd check out the OpenCV documentation and examples. This is basically what I use for face recognition in videos[0]; for recognising cars or other objects, you'd probably want to either train your own model or use something like OpenCV's YOLOv3 (example: [1] but you'd need to steal the video reading code from the first link[0])
Thanks. Also just kinda wondering if there's been any leaps lately, as I guess this is the same way as one would have done it a few years ago as well. But now that one can upload images and chat about them to multi modal LLMs, wondering if there's easier ways now (but preferable not uploading a million images to chatgpt api and paying the cost).
Like, could I avoid training or specifying much or becoming very knowledgeable in this domain, are we there yet?
Could I say "detect the frames of every car when it passes position X in the video, and then grab the frame when the same car passes position Y", and then I could calculate the frame difference to know the speeds. Or would I have to do loads of code and training still for something like this?
(I know I'm asking for much here, just curious what the SOTA is in this right now)
Ask a decent (non-free) AI this question, and I bet it can make you a python script to load a video and output which timestamps show a driver holding a phone.
My step brother has been asking me to help him setup a load of cameras for watching his marron ponds. he has foxes, crows and humans stealing from his ponds.
In theory this would really help him get alerts to invaders and I presume filter out the sheep and alpacas he has wandering around as well.
My issue is that its in a rural area and the paddocks are quite large with no power to most of the ponds so what cameras and network to use to get the data back to the storage and processing server.
Begginning to think he might be better off running a modular system, each cluster of ponds would have its own camera cluster and mini server with the network being last mile 2.4ghz just for alerts and a solar panel bank for charging the battery and running it during the day.
What would I get away with here? N100 mini device? processing maybe 6 cameras?
Right now I am using Eufy Solocam S220 cameras to monitor wildlife around my place. They are solar powered cameras that only need a couple hours of sunlight each day to keep the battery topped off. In my experience over the last 4 months if it is cloudy and the camera needs to run on battery alone it will use 2-3% of the available charge per day so that means that the camera will function for extended periods with no sunshine.
I appreciate the local storage option on this camera. It will also use the HomeBase series local storage devices if you want to do that. These are WiFi cameras so you need to install an app on your phone and then set them up on your network and then you will be able to see videos in near real-time. The delays that I see are about 5 seconds though I haven't measured.
The detection settings can be tailored from low to high. With mine in place I can regularly monitor insect activity for insects as small as 1 cm moving across the field of view if the sensitivity is set to middle setting. It will detect beetles, ants, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, centipedes, spiders, etc. I have multiple videos of animals including deer, raccoon, opossum, fox, rabbit, rat, two species of mouse; also reptiles like lizards, and a snake; also birds including roadrunners, cardinals, wrens, chickadees, mockingbirds and others.
The night vision works well too. I don't mind being awakened at 2 am to watch a fox nosing around. I had seen the tracks several times over the years and my neighbor said that they saw it moving back and forth across his place but I had never seen it alive and moving until I got that camera. Pretty great.
That model camera may not work for his needs. It only has a 2X zoom. Eufy does have other solar models that use cellular network I think. I will likely upgrade to 4K models later with higher zoom and use one of their HomeBase storage devices since they can store up to 16TB if you provide the disk.
I haven't used their AI since it trains on local data on a HomeBase and I don't yet use a HomeBase. It does work though since one of my relatives has several different model Eufy cams and a HomeBase and they tagged photos to train for people and set up exclusion zones and it all works for them.
All in all I am glad I chose Eufy cams over standard game cameras. It ends up being less expensive and near zero hassle to use them.
I have the earlier eufy stuff at home, the viewing distance is nowhere near whe he needs let alone the wifi network range. (Cam 2 Pro, and Cam 2C)
just looking at the S220 i dont think it would be much better in terms of range. but the solar cam idea is worth thinking about.
The solar charging/recharging cam is the way to go. That was my #1 consideration since mine are deployed too far from any infrastructure and using a battery game camera just adds to the maintenance load.
I chose the inexpensive S220 cams because they fit my use case but I would expect that for your use case a different model would be needed. Here at my place I can use WiFi cams and do the nature monitoring with the only consideration or parameter that I have as a constraint being that the camera needs to be installed in a location that gets a minimum of 2 hours of sunlight daily on average.
When I first deployed one of my cams I had it in a non-optimum orientation, facing NNW instead of South so that the panel did not get direct sunlight at all. In that orientation working from a full charge on utility power pre-deployment I used the camera for two weeks before I redeployed it at the same location facing SSE. My initial plan was to position it using the Eufy mount installed on a post and the only post was N of the location I needed to monitor. After watching the battery charge cycle I determined that it would eventually discharge and require a utility top-off. I redeployed the camera on an old, cheap camera tripod a few feet from the initial location facing SSE so that the solar panel got adequate sunlight and in a matter of a few days it was topped off again.
I really like the solar powered cameras. They add flexibility to any deployment plan.
I've been running Frigate for many years, using a PN50 NUC and a Coral USB dongle, the Coral is a must, at least in my case. I had a full blown Ubiquiti/Unifi setup with cameras + their software. Way to many false alarms compared to Frigate. Now I run 10+ cameras with 24/7 recording and alarms with images pushed to Telegram. The identification is instant as well as the telegram message.
Running a mix of Ubiquti/TP-Link VIGI+TAPO/Reolink. I'm running everything in containers and everything works perfect!
Polling HN: is there any upgrade to Coral? It's 5 years old at this point, and with the explosion of AI apps & HW acceleration, I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be anything to update Coral's niche, of an IO-attached NPU.
OpenVINO might be a good alternative, as many Intel-based mini pc’s support it. Or a decent desktop with an Intel CPU. Or maybe something with an Arc GPU (integrated or dedicated).
Disclaimer: I didn’t try it yet but the last rabbit hole regarding OpenVINO comparisons looked too good to be true and it seems Frigate supports it too. Win-win.
TIL openmv.io, looks really neat for small project. Especially cool with the thermal vision, that would be a very nice addition to improve false positives for <living-things> detection.
But for surveillence, it's usually the sensor/camera quality that is the most important. I've struggled hard to find an affordable IP camera that can actually handle both shutter speed + quality in order to for example read license plates.
are you using with only one Coral USB dongle at the same time (plugged in the PN50 NUC) and get successful object or person identification with frigate?
And why telegram? Is it connected to frigate only for notifications resulting from the identifications?
a) 8x PoE cameras
b) 2x WiFi cameras + sometimes some esp32cam etc.
Yes, only one Coral dongle and it's handles all cameras perfectly. With some masks I rarely get any false positives and it is like 99% correct hit-rate.
Telegram is just a way to get a fast glance of an detection, so it sends me an image with what type of detection it was and the frame it found it in with detection frame around the object. This is handled via Home Assistant and some automation I've written. The results comes via mqtt to hass.
Echoing what most users have said, running frigate last 4 years. Early adopter. Cool thing is you can technically run webrtc from nest webcams via HA into Frigate. I run frigate without Home Assistant, but recently added home assistant back so I can pipe webRTC thru HA plugin to frigate. Now I dont need to pay for nest aware.
The title is misleading, you get that "full local" just with the default install and model. And the default model sucks, for example this is a "person alert": https://imgur.com/a/uDCCTjr, this is just funny https://imgur.com/a/pP4ZvQI
I have a love/hate relation with Frigate, I use it since 2 years but since the business model of the developer is provide a "good model" using a custom one is not possible (at least not in a easy ways AFAIK).
I use my cameras to track a family member with a medical condition, this is why I do not feel confortable uploading those image to the "Frigate+" service to eventually get better training.
I'm probably being dense here, but could you please explain your first image link? Assuming you didn't accidentally link the wrong image, I'm struggling to see how even a not-very-good model would think that's a person, and it doesn't look like a security camera screenshot like your second image does.
Is not the wrong image. I got a notification (thru Home Assistant) because Frigate detected that group of toy horses as a person. I tried to find the image where the box is visible but only found that preview.
Edit: I found a better place to make an screenshot https://imgur.com/a/5qpDWia There you can see the event marked as "Person"
Person you're replying to mentioned Frigate+ which is the paid subscription option offering the ability to upload images to their servers in order to further train the models to get better accuracy, so no longer 100% local.
Maybe you're suggesting that using two additional tools in combination with the free version of Frigate brings its quality up on par with that of an extra-trained Frigate+? If that's so it would be great if you could say that and elaborate how so / why, rather than just dropping in some new tool names and no explanation as to how/if they address GP's points. (Thanks in advance if you do come back and explain.)
Edit: I just looked into Doubletake + Compreface, seems they're both facial recognition tools, so using them wouldn't overcome the problem GP commenter reported that Frigate without Frigate+'s additional training doesn't do a good enough job of general object tagging for them?
As an alternative, you might also want to check out scrypted which offers a lot of cross-integration features and hardware optimized local AI processing (eg on MacMinis M*). Developer is super responsive in the discord.
Frigate has been great for me. Been using it for couple of years in a Unraid server with 8 cameras connected. Mix of Eufy and Tapo cameras. Only downside is that it doesn't have a IOS/Android application yet. So for now, I just use the frigate web UI as PWA on IOS. Then access it on my local network via VPN once I receive a notification.
The documentation is rather scarse on performance numbers, but it looks like the hierachy of price/performance is like Intel iGPU ("free"), Intel A310, Nvidia GPU.
I'm explicitly leaving out the Coral TPU, since it's been reported that the newer Intel CPUs (Core Ultra) seem to provide the same performance with it's iGPU.
Still works with frigate, although I've heard that modern (whatever that means) CPUs can do as good a job as the Coral TPU, making it somewhat redundant.
I ain't running it on a modern CPU though, so I'm happy with the Coral.
+1 to using Frigate. I've had it running on my home server for a couple of years and it has served us very well. Detect is running on an old GTX 960 I had laying around, and it works a charm (though I'll probably run out of legroom once I bring up more cameras).
One of the big advantages is that I can pick and choose which camera I use, and then segment it off on it's own firewalled VLAN so it's only talking to my server applications. That lets me know that its not phoning home, and I can run PoE cameras that are immune to wifi jammers.
The idea that the surroundings of my house aren't being beamed straight into an Amazon datacenter somewhere is particularly satisfying.
What is the best outdoor wifi camera (ideally with a solar panel, so no wires) that works with Frigate. I see Tapo and Eufy mentioned in the comments, but do folks here have favorites?
I'm looking for outdoor + wireless, primarily for wildlife watching.
I didn't like having to fire up some NVR software just to get the camera live stream, and you're locked into whatever options that software might have. With ffmpeg you can do some cool stuff with filters.
You dont necessarily need the Coral device. I'm running frigate on an Intel N200 CPU with one camera, it uses OpenVINO for GPU accelerated detection, and consumes about 10% CPU.
I use Ubiquiti Protect Cameras and recently bought a AI key[1] which adds license plate and facial recognition features to all cameras even non-AI enabled models. It works really well and of course all 100% self-hosted.
Yes, up to 4 I believe. Do note, the AI Key does not support LLMish feature search phrases and some limited advanced AI features that the AI Key does. However, the AI Key is $799 and the AI Port is $199 so for me personally not worth the huge increase in price.
I don’t get the appeal or desire of a 24/7/365 perimeter camera system on a _personal_ home. Society has truly gone downhill if individual homeowners need surveillance tech to appease their own fears in a _suburb_.
At most, I would really only need a front door video camera that acts as a door bell. One of the things I miss most about my older apartment was the keyless entry and ability to virtually answer the door.
How far out of a major city would I need to live for my fears to become rational and my lust for surveillance to be justified, in your opinion? Beyond the wall?
This is cool and it amazes me how the “big” home security companies don’t have this. My Ring cameras false detect all the time. The front will detect the flag as a person when it blows in the wind. The rear gets triggered by the pool robot skimmer. As much as I’d love to try this, I don’t have the time. It would be great though if it was built into something I could buy.
Is this capable of doing something, like, telling if someone is standing in a bathroom? Is it capable of determining if they're specifically in the shower? It sounds like this is based on weird snooping goals but it's just the example that comes to mind in terms of its ability to tag whats happening in video/image.
Side note. I’m surprised we’re not doing more with LLMs as far as image and video processing. We now have some level of imaging understanding in a box (and some common sense). Seems like there would be millions of possibilities.
Is manufacturing using it for anything? More security applications?
Frigate has been an overweight nightmare for me to work with. Trying to detect wildlife that are not in their classification models is basically impossible. I've been better off using motion / motioneye for a lightweight and practical approach
yeah - i've been using it for several years. it's got some issues: fails to detect cars and trucks at night (apparently it doesn't know what to do with the moving headlights); also frequently fails to detect me walking past the camera with my 4 small dogs on our morning walk; confuses farm equipment for cars and continues to record even when the object is stationary. still it's better than most of the other software i've tried.
I disagree regarding the choice of codec. Currently, I have no issues receiving, saving, and viewing H265 streams.
Any modern CPU/GPU can handle them natively (I use a 2018 Intel CPU w/ QSV), any modern desktop or mobile device (I use both Android and iOS) can stream it, and the recorded video takes up less space. What are you using that requires transcoding?
If like myself you're a Linux and Firefox and Android user, H.265 support is extremely lacking; you're probably ok on a modern Android, but you'll not be able to view any of the streams or do scrubbing etc on desktop in Firefox, nothing video related is going to work in the Frigate UI, you won't be able to preview videos etc and will have to download them and use VLC. This might not sound like an issue, but it's a huge pain in the arse if you actually want to use it day to day.
All in, H.265 is unsuitable if you use a specific set of software/tools that is quite a common combination; Linux/Firefox/Android.
The original commenter is correct, if you're one of these people like myself, avoid H.265 like the plague until support is better and be sure to buy cameras that also support H.264.
For Hikvision sourced cameras, previews and exports work, but you can't play clips without transcoding. Unfortunately I haven't found a transcoding option that doesn't completely swamp my CPU (with 3 cameras) so I'm living without ability to play clips right now.
What is the cheapest way to do something like this in a DIY way with FOSS? Assuming you have to buy the computer, and any other hardware. Assuming also near real-time processing and reasonably high accuracy.
I picked up a bunch of 4k POE "simicam" cameras from AliExpress for 25 euros each. These serve up RTSP streams to frigate. I made some minor frigate config changes - I set it to keep 7 days of full recordings (just because i am paranoid), so this uses approx 1Tb of storage (5 cameras currently, more to go online soon). Frigate is running on an old laptop with a Coral AI USB and 2Tb NVME for storage. I enabled detection of cars and animals as well as the default of just humans. It works pretty well, but has some annoying quirks, e.g. if a dog runs past where a car is parked it will trigger an alert for both a dog and a car. It also detects weird conglomerate shapes as human sometimes, e.g. a bucket left at the end of some rolled up bird netting with some pieces of timber sticking out underneath can be vaguely human shaped when viewed from a height. I run the free open source version, and I'm sure I could get better results if I played with the configuration more.
Its hit and miss to be honest. They do have a day/night mode. One camera is indoors in a shed - it picks up moths (as birds) and even a bat a couple of times. One camera that is outdoors regularly detects the fox that visits us almost every night. However another camera pointed at his next destination never picks the fox up at all. The main difference between the two camera environments appears to be third party lighting - there are street lights in the direction of the one that does not detect the fox, and also the glow of a robot mowers charger light. One or both seems to be putting off the cameras ambient light sensor and prevents night mode from kicking in. The simicams do have some configuration for night mode also, none of which I have tried out yet. Options like infrared lamp vs white lamp vs dual, and day-night mode of "photoresistor" vs "scene brightness" and also some "color to black luma" and "black to color brightness" settings. I should really play with those some more, but they've been left as defaults so far.
I have a cheap 25 euro PoE cameras from aliexpress that gives decent video quality. The night vision though is lacking in comparison to one Brillcam that I have. The cameras are connected to a cheap 20 euro PoE switches that advertise being able to put out 60W of power.
For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:
OpenIPC is an alternative open firmware for your IP camera.
OpenIPC is an open source operating system from the open community targeting for IP cameras with ARM and MIPS processors from several manufacturers in order to replace that closed, opaque, insecure, often abandoned and unsupported firmware pre-installed by a vendor.
The Network Video Recorder UNVR is 320€ VAT incl. Does this exist as a software which I can download for free and run in a VM, so that the Unify camera, which would cost at least 100€ can store the data over there?
I've been running Frigate for more than two years now and it beats the hell out of any system I've tried in terms of detection speed and reliability. For context, I've tried Ring, Tapo cameras, and also Eufy security. Today I have turned away from all the cameras except for the Tapo cameras now serving RTSP streams into my Frigate instance. I have also blocked them from accessing the internet and that gave it complete privacy by default.
Eufy Security started showing advertisements about their new products whenever I tap on a motion detected notification. They prioritize their ads over your own security which is ridiculous. Not just that, some of their clips stored in their cloud storage would never open despite the fact I used to pay them my membership fees every month. They were also caught storing passwords and other security credentials in plain text. Thanks to them, they were the primary motivation for me to move away from using those proprietary platforms and look for something self-hosted.
I got Frigate running on my old hardware with hardware acceleration enabled via RX 550 GPU and detection is always under one second. I wrote a small app that uses Frigate API to grab screenshots and send me notifications via Telegram and Pushover. It's been very self-sustainable for two years now. I only had to restart the service two times in all of this time. I am also using some tunneling from my VPS into the locally hosted Frigate running on my home server and it's just been flawless. Thanks to this amazing project.
Are you using this with Home Assistant?
(Edit: my ISP is blocking, this is not an issue with hacs...
I'm trying to integrate this, but the HACS integration does not seem to work with my HA because the get.hacs.xyz server is misconfigured.
My frigate runs in a separate container and is configured to send MQTT messages to Homeassistant. Frigate can also expose snapshots which Homeassistant displays: http://myfrigate.lan:1984/api/frame.jpeg?src=CAMERA_GARAGE
Do you know of any good Soup-To-Nuts tutorial "for dummies" on such a setup? Finally getting some secure home monitoring/automation has bubbled up as a priority and I've started looking at Home Assistant but even for someone with some technical background the learning curve combined with the sheer breadth of options is overwhelming.
Try following this: https://chatgpt.com/share/6893f888-8a70-800c-ad8a-0987257b93...
In frigate, add this to the top of your configuration file:
mqtt:
Frigate will start sending various messages to Homeassistant. Go to HA, go to MQTT settings and listen to a topic frigate/#Observe the messages, pick the one which suits your needs.
Follow this for an example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6893fd1c-2940-800c-a358-a840029e6e...
You dont really need to add the HA automation via yaml, you can click it through manually.
You don't need HACS, just download frigate integration to config/custom_components in your HA folder
Great, hacs seemed overly complicated. Appreciate the note!
No, I don't run it with Home Assistant. I just run it as a standalone service.
How did you get the Tapo cameras to play nice in rtsp mode with frigate? I found that even one camera did horrible things to the wifi. Even with one camera per AP per band, they caused trouble.
Note that the WiFi chips on these devices are not so great, they need good coverage. I run two Asus routers in mesh network mode to get good coverage and never had any issues with anything
Seems to remember them working better with a certain WPA2 setup
The little white one with "wings" seemed to work better than the really cheap circular base with circular camera ones
Can you elaborate, what kind of trouble did the Tapo cameras create?
What is your approach to keeping these cameras off the Internet, but still on your local network to ensure they're not backchanneling with your awareness?
Just block them on your router using a VLAN or a routing policy -- OpenWrt has both of these features.
All IoT devices on my network go into a VLAN that blocks internet access. Using Unifi, I think it's just a checkbox to turn internet access on/off. I use a virtual nic on my Home Assistant VM that recognizes that vlan and can communicate with all those devices, as well as a separate nic which is hooked up to the main vlan.
In my router admin page, there is something called parental control. I used it to disable internet access for all the cameras. I've also used the DHCP settings to give all the cameras static IPs as well.
Dedicated VLAN. Firewall rule forbids all outgoing connections from camera VLAN, even to other LAN, but allows inbound from designated devices on a privileged VLAN (this way random devices on my network can’t talk to the cameras). Frigate is on a VM that is so designated.
I do DHCP reservations then firewall rules. Not as safe as a VLAN but not aware of any devices assigning themselves random IPs outside the DHCP reservation to circumvent it
Easier than getting VLANs working across switches and APs
Is it possible to use Eufy cameras with Frigate ?
yes. You have to go into the Eufy mobile app and enable RTSP for each camera you have registered. Assign the camera a static IP and add a password there. Then use that in your frigate config yaml to setup the stream. Including go2rtc.
Your go2rtc url should look something like this and it will display that url in the camera configuration in the app itself.
rtsp://cameraname:password@<ip address>/live0
Yes, this answer is correct. Although I use tapo cameras now, I played with eufy cameras in the beginning, and it seemed to have worked just as well.
I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your videofeeds in the first place?
Like, I remember thinking the GNU guys were hippie crackpots. But it was like 15 years ago and I have forgot how to relate to that feeling... it is like realizing all my colleagues are not using adblockers and visit sites with ads. I just can't understand.
I still feel that anyone who insists on "GNU/Linux" is a hippie crackpot.
> I am sorry to be that guy, and I think it is good that you realized it your self, but how could you trust them with your videofeeds in the first place?
In my case, I received a ring doorbell as a gift. I ran it for several years and replaced it with Reolink on a vlan.
Well to be fair I've used some silly and expensive Meater Plus thermometer that needed an Android app just because I got is as a gift from my father in law and wanted to be able to at least tell him I used it.
It is hard to turn down present with "it will spy on me" when ordinary people think a thermometer can't. But I am quite sure I would refuse to install a SaaS CCTV.
To be fair, when I had a Ring camera it wasn't owned by Amazon and they weren't sharing my data with the police.
Ah, but they WERE stalking their customers. Although that continued into Amazon too.
And to be clear, when I say stalking, I mean it literally:
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ring-security-cameras-gave...
> In August of 2017, a supervisor discovered what the employee was doing only "after the supervisor noticed that the male employee was only viewing videos of 'pretty girls,'" the complaint alleges. That employee was terminated, the filing says.
Phew -- I am definitely not a "pretty girl".
Seriously, though, I'm glad that I ditched Ring and that it only pointed at my walkway.
Not to nitpick but you're only really guaranteed privacy unless you know there's only a wired connection. If it has wifi the camera could hop onto a nearby open network and do whatever it wanted without your knowledge, assuming evil enough firmware
You can't know there's only a wired connection unless you open the camera up and inspect the PCB for an antenna, and it could still be disguised. However, by "I've only given it access to a specific network" you already eliminate 99.99% of the problem. The other 0.01% isn't really worth worrying about.
I know you're joking, and there's been murmurings of it becoming economical for TV manufacturers to put 5G in their TVs to spy on your viewing habits.
There is no privacy with wires, only TEMPEST!
I know what you're referring to (that wifi will be so cheap and fit in a single chip that it will just phone home on open networks anyway. This was a prediction for smart TVs a few years ago) , but I think if that day comes, the devices will be easily detected and defeated by cutting the antenna or taping foil around them.
And if you're worried about threat actors on the level of backdoor/compromised firmware, the last thing you should be doing is using TP-Link Tapo cameras.
TP-Link Tapo cameras (or any other cheap cams) are fine. As long you take necessary steps to prevent leaking or calling home. I have a mix of both tapo and eufy. All of them isolated via VLAN with router FW rules set to block all traffic. The only time I had to use anything connected externally is when I had to setup each camera using the Eufy or tplink mobile apps. But once they were added to VLAN isolated wireless network, I never had to ever use the mobile app. (Unless I specifically update the firmware that addressed a problem)
The above should apply to any 'IoT' device.
My usual pet peeve -
They use the abbreviation NVR in the first sentence without saying what it means.
It means "networked video recorder".
Please don't do that. Not everyone who comes across your site is a member of your particular niche.
Assuming visitors know what NVR stands for seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption, but even if they don't I think there's enough context for someone to still understand what Frigate is.
Usually I would agree with you, but this is an incredibly common initialism, used by not just people in the industry, but also by consumers. Sure, it may not be as widespread as VHS (global) or API (tech-adjacent), but anyone who is in the market for this software already knows what NVR means.
Most people would know the term from either being quoted or looking up CCTV solutions, all of which, unless they're fully "cloud-based", come with a component that is called the NVR. You wouldn't even consider this if you weren't aware of the concept. If NVR means nothing to you, Network Video Recorder doesn't mean anything to you either. This is meant to be a replacement for closed and inflexible hardware boxes that are sold together with security cameras, and the name of those boxes are "NVRs".
As a consumer I disagree. Never heard of "NVR" but I can suss out what "network video recorder" means from context.
NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit. And there XVR wich can combine both Network and Digital cameras
Which is odd because the first time I heard the term DVR was in the late 1990's, referring to the box that was used to record TV signals digitally for playback and/or ad-skipping. The term distinguished it from things such as VCRs, which recorded in analog, on tape. Those DVRs were, in fact, digital.
If the recorder uses digital video as its storage, it's a real DVR, even if the video input is that weird HD variant of NTSC that's everywhere in security cameras
As a video professional, with many devices for recording video both at baseband and via ip, and responsible for delivering audio and video streams via networks to tens of millions of people, I had no idea what “NVR” meant.
I don’t believe video professional equates to security professional. Would not expect someone who is a video professional to know NVR but at the same time if you don’t know what an NVR is I would not expect someone to be using this software. The entry point into this space is an NVR.
“incredibly common initialism, used by not just people in the industry, but also by consumers”
Consumers are a wide range of people. 99 percent who have never heard
NVR is a niche term for a tiny number of people in a tiny industry.
Niche term yes but if you don’t know what an NVR is you probably don’t want to go down the road of Frigate. It is a lot more common than you might think these are traditionally deployed in most small biz.
I don’t believe video professional equates to security professional.
Just stop. You're wrong, you're defending an indefensible point, and even if you "win," there's no upside for you.
Signed, someone else who's interested in this field and in Frigate in particular, and who had no idea what "NVR" stood for.
Sorry you took offense. I believe in a thread about initialism that some forms are expected based on the nature of the content. And specifically in this case, I am not sure what a video professional has to do with someone who works in security. So no I don’t need to stop and to be frank if you don’t know what a NVR is Frigate is most likely not a great solution but it also might be and you will learn a lot!
Are you involved with the Frigate project, personally?
Please consider that we're not all English-speaking, and that such terms may be unknown to people who aren't from your culture, even if we do understand your language. CCTV could mean "China Central TeleVision" for instance ;-)
In the context of surveillance cameras it is perfectly clear what CCTV stands for, and if it is an unknown to someone because they are not familiar with the english language it is also perfectly reasonable to just force them to look it up like they would any other english word they are unfamiliar with.
Acronyms are not the same as the English language as they are not words by themselves but compressions. "Closed-circuit television" is self-evident to a reader; CCTV isn't. And "in the context", yes, but readers are not necessarily experts in their fields. This is why many news publications usually expand acronyms.
So to be clear, I think that it would make sense for Frigate to define NVR the first time they use it on their site. However, this isn't a news publication and I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect any serious visitor to the Frigate site to be expert enough to know what an NVR is.
Hard disagree. I've just started looking at some home monitoring and was extremely frustrated by this assumption because literally everyone assumes you already know. Home Assistant documentation uses it, frigate's home page uses it, pages like this use it. It's not ubiquitous enough in the vernacular to simply be a proper noun (eg nobody cares that "LASER" is an acronym).
I finally had to look it up on Wikipedia so I could understand what they were even referring to and "Network Video Recorder" was much clearer as to what the component was. Overall it creates barrier to entry where everyone operates on the assumption that you're only shopping because you're already a customer.
> Most people would know the term from either being quoted or looking up CCTV solutions
I'm not sure why you're assuming most people ever requested a quote or looked up CCTV solutions. I sure haven't.
But the site is for software managing... CCTV solutions.
I didn't know what NVR meant either but it seems reasonable for Frigate to assume 90% of the people coming across their site would be given the context.
Disagree. I would expect 90% or more of the folks coming to Frigate would know what an NVR is. Would be nice to define all things definitely but NVR seems table stakes knowledge to even consider using Frigate.
I'm exactly the target market for this, I've been looking at using Frigate for the past month, and I've done a ton of research.
I did not know what "NVR" meant prior to reading the OP.
100% of people coming to frigate can read "networked video recorder".
Seeing this bizarre gatekeeping made it crystal clear I don't want to do anything near Frigate ecosystem /devices.
Even though it would suit me perfectly - simply by treating people like me, not knowing that acronym before, as somewhat "unworthy".
Cult.
It's engineers. There is a good reason companies send sales people, not engineers, to meet customers.
So what? Like I said it does not hurt to define but at the same time if you don’t know what NVR stands for, Frigate is not for you. It’s like reading an equity research paper and complaining EPS is not defined. Some things just don’t need to be defined and if you don’t know, you most likely are not the target audience.
Most stores will just market the devices as NVR or NVR Recorder (I know). If you google it, you get your answer immediately.
You are missing the point. It has been considered general English language competency that you always expand the first instance of any abbreviation that is not absolutely obvious in context, e.g., USA, “e.g.”, or CIA, unless you happen to be writing about the Culinary Institute of America in most contexts outside of the culinary context.
It is a rather annoying myopic perspective I most often run across in tech, where technical people for whatever reason are so fixated on their little corner that they are either unaware or simply indifferent to the fact that there are others in the world, and that if they want to spread their work and impact, they need to make things approachable and lower barriers to entry.
It Is why the rule of general language proficiency exists in English especially because of all the abbreviations, to facilitate information and knowledge sharing.
Let’s all improve by going through whatever our project is and make sure that at least in the context, abbreviations are easily understood by expanding them, e.g., your introduction/overview page and documentation should always expand most first instance abbreviations, including in separate, high level segments (e.g., if you have different first contact pages or objects) unless they are globally known to society.
It’s really not any different than any other “sales” tactic; you will not be successful selling something if you do not first describe what it does in a one-liner. Ask yourself, “who is the person I want/need to come to this thing and should I assume they would know what this all means?”
What I'm arguing is that in the context of CCTV (Closed-circuit television) systems, NVR is a universal term.
I would also argue that the expansion of "e.g." is not "absolutely obvious". I know what it means ("for example"), but I had to google it to know it's an abbreviation of "exempli gratia", and I don't speak Latin, so I don't even know exactly what that means without reading further.
In the same way, you can also quickly understand from the page what an NVR is without knowing the exact expansion.
I have no real conclusion here, but sort of land on the side of "Why wouldn't you expand it?"
The abbreviation of e.g. isn't a good example. It is hundreds of years old and taught in schools. It is essentially a feature of the language (or at least of writing the language) and can hardly be compared to the far more recent initialism NVR. It is ubiquitous and all native English speakers should know it and all non-native English speakers should learn it.
VCR is an example that is almost always referred to solely as its initialism. However, this became a completely ubiquitous term. Early advertisements didn't say "VCR", they said things like "video recorder"[0]. Once it was ubiquitous non-specialists knew what a VCR was even if they didn't understand the initialism and they were marketed just as "VCR". One could make the case that "VCR" stopped being a pure initialism and become more of a word. (VHS on the other hand... not expanded in that video.)
Is NVR ubiquitous enough? BestBuy sells them without expanding the initialism (in the examples I checked), so maybe. However, I bet if you sampled people, the majority wouldn't be able to tell you. And BestBuy selling them this way may have more to do with limited 'item title' space.
It might be the case that it is well-enough known among people who 'need to know' like security folks. I'd argue that's probably not meaningful if BestBuy is retailing them to the public.
Maybe a better example is something like an air-admittance valve (AAV). Most people have never heard of it, but all plumbers have heard of it. In context, anyone can probably figure out what it does. And yet Oatey "correctly" (according to style rules) identifies the name and puts the initialism in parentheses[1].
So on the one hand, it may be ubiquitous enough that it doesn't matter (and is becoming more of a word). On the other hand, there's evidence here that it does matter because it isn't ubiquitous enough for people to be comfortable not knowing what the acronym means.
What I can't see is the downside of writing "network video recorder (NVR)" on the first instance of is use at least on the landing page. Everyone has to learn what it means somewhere and it seems like a missed marketing opportunity for it to not be through your product's landing page. It may also reduce friction or aid in SEO. (YMMV, but I get quite different results searching for "network video recorder" and "NVR".)
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ9nkyo01HQ [1] - https://www.oatey.com/products/air-admittance-valves-aav
You're defending expanding these terms (which I agree to some point), but then writing 'e.g.', 'YMMV' and 'SEO' which you could have expanded or replaced by more obvious constructions like 'for example', 'your mileage may vary' and 'search engine optimization'.
I’m not trying to sell anything, I’m keeping my audience in mind, and I’m writing to an internet forum, not professionally.
NVR is absolutely obvious in the context of Frigate, an AI object detector for surveillance cameras.
Right, but I don’t want to open tabs and Google terms right after I start reading an article ;) Even as a super technical person
NVR is to distinguish it from DVR, Digtal Video Recorder (ironically it's not really digital, more like analog) It's much cheaper than NVR, because the camras are simple and diffrere the encoding to the DVR unit. And there XVR with can combine both Network and Digital cameras
It‘s still a bit flaky getting video acceleration (not talking about object detection but video decoding) working but after that it is one of the best solutions for live object detection I‘ve ever tried: no more small animals waking me up in the night.
P.S.: I‘m also supporting them with a yearly? subsciption to train the „A.I.“ model against false positives I provide which increased the accuracy even more.
This is becoming a real problem because the drivers/software for the Coral AI boards is yet another example of Google Abandonware(tm) which has a hard dependency on a Paleolithic-era version of Python. Comically, the hardware is still sold.
In so many words if you expect to use the Coral boards you are stuck on EOL versions of Debian/Ubuntu - which have terribly old video drivers and missing kernel GPU support. There's a good chance your modern GPU - even well-supported Intel ones - won't work.
Imagine buying new hardware in 2025 whose software still required Windows 7.
Re: outdated Python: Isn’t this a perfect usecase for Docker? Nix/NixOS is another option.
No. You might get it to run, but you would also get old security exploits to run.
It's fine, you're not running a network-accessible part of the service on unpatched software. The only input this part of the software requires is trusted configuration data and a video feed which could hypothetically be malicious, but then the question becomes why you're running an adversarial camera on your network, and why you're allowing it to connect to the internet to fetch latest exploits and C&C instructions.
You can also transcode the video before feeding it to any outdated software and run it in a VM if you're paranoid.
Never underestimate the power of a specially crafted raccoon whose appearance can trigger a buffer overrun
Yes, it is, because then you aren’t stuck with a EOL distribution where you get even more security issues to deal with (vs. just EOL Python).
Also, what kind of “security exploits” would an outdated Python result in if the Python interpreter itself isn’t serving a network port or accepting arbitrary user input in general?
I assume Frigate itself isn’t running the web app on the same Python version - it’s likely just the Coral SDK that requires an outdated Python version.
> no more small animals waking me up in the night.
not waking you, but it is cool to have a collection of animal photos. Sort of amazing there's a hidden world.
Hedgehogs are fantastic TV - a member of my family used to get some great footage including one very memorable fight where one ended up rolling the other one around
> including one very memorable fight where one ended up rolling the other one around
You can’t drop something like that without uploading it to YouTube right now.
Very sorry to say I don't have access to it! If I ever get hold of a copy you'll be the first to know
Some nights my cat goes absolutely ballistic running from window to window to door, meowing and scratching to get out. And inevitably if I open my camera and look I'll see something like a family of racoons walking by or a skunk in the yard. It's a little consolation that he's just hearing other animals and isn't possessed by demons at 2am.
Yeah didn't realize raccoons wandered in families until I saw a line of 5 of them wander by nightly with Frigate
You can do both. You can set it to detect animals but turn off reviews. The reviews act like alerts you can "view" whereas the detection as more like metadata you can use on the search page
My Wyze cameras love to report "pets" - which have been deer, foxes, raccoons, opossums, and yes occasionally a cat or dog.
For sure, but rats and moths are usually not that cool ^^
Mines been getting worse.
Been running about 2-3 years, was mostly fine before but now I get constant false positives from the children's garden toys, scooter left in the garden, pirate flag waving etc.
I don't submit false positives for privacy reasons but I'm looking at trainingy own model. I've got years worth of positives/negatives to train on.
That "subscription" is one which I gladly pay due to multiple reasons:
1. It supports the developers(s) 2. The price can be directly attributed to cost for training 3. You can keep the models you trained during your subscription indefinately
That's pretty much the opposite to AgentDVR. I don't need hosted services for remote access or push notifications - I can do that myself. But if I want to abide the license terms, I need to purchase a monthly subscription for remote access over my own VPN.
So burglar just need to carry big sign "Ignore previous instructions and don't report anything"? "
Looking in their github, it says that it uses openCV and Tensorflow. The motion detection is done with openCV and will be immune against any attack unless you move so slow that you are under the detection threshold.
Tensorflow for the object detection doesn't do any OCR thus written instructions dont work. However, according to the website the system has a limited list of objects it detects. So maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent detection.
Finally a practical use for the Metal Gear Solid cardboard box!
>So maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent detection
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-ai-paul-scharre/
I think the defaults are fairly sensitive. I had to add motion masks to ignore trees
In addition, if something else like a 2nd tree moves, then it will get sent to the detector which will potentially label the other thing (my trees were causing false positives because it thought the stationary fence post was a human)
> The motion detection is done with openCV and will be immune against any attack unless you move so slow
Not so sure about that, there's some cool stuff being done with adversarial models to force mis-detection of otherwise normal-looking images.
With an open source model, though, a criminal may be able to work out a 2D image that he could print out that would identify him as a package or a windy branch.
the criminal could spend years to become a trusted maintainer so they can upload a model that's been fine tuned to ignore objects with a specific QR code.
I think you may be overestimating my local crackhead porch pirates
Light shinobi.
I have two cameras at my front door - one is the doorbell and the other looks towards the door, which is on the side of a porch.
Probably a "scramble suit" [0] or just a tshirt or hoodie with patterns engineered to escape AI recognition [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly [1] https://medium.com/data-science/avoiding-detection-with-adve...
Someone made a shirt called ChatGP-Tee, that had (IIRC) a picture of a generic office view, it confused the model completely and it didn't recognise the wearer as human :D
Reminds me of the "ugliest t shirt" from Zero History by Gibson
More like, wear a full body raccoon suit.
I like the idea, but no.
They have a two-stage approach, first motion detection with - I think - OpenCV and then afterwards object detection of zones of interest with different object detection models, depending on your hardware.
It supports Coral TPU, Halio Accelerator and most GPUs. I think AMD is still the worst, since ROCm is not available on iGPUs.
Afterwards, they provide/support models like edgedet (Coral), YOLO-NAS, YOLO, D-Fine or RF-DETR.
They also offer paid access to a specially trained version of YOLO-NAS where you can also train your own images.
You can unironically defeat the person detector with a box a la Metal Gear. Kojima was truly thinking ahead.
If you are truly paranoid you can still set a motion detection zone, Frigate is awesome.
Maybe if ring or whatever major manufacturer popularly rolled this feature out and criminals could easily ID ring cameras
It uses "regular" AI, not LLMs (although iirc you can use an LLM to generate descriptions)
waves hand
"These are not the detections you are looking for."
Or a bright IR flashlight
This is worth mentioning but a GPU or TPU is not required if you have a small number of cameras and set up your detection zones right. I use a low resolution/framerate MJPEG substream for detection to reduce the amount of decoder effort and use h264 only for recording and viewing. Openvino is the recommended choice for CPU recognition and it's much faster than the default Tensorflow detector.
It only uses around 20% CPU on a 6 core VM (running on a Ivy Bridge Xeon) with two cameras.
Nearly an aside, but:
Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
If you want to install them for later police work, that still seems tedious and you might require off-site backup. In public places we often have CCTV of people, but unless you have number signs on vehicles, they seem to not help with conviction rates by much.
One good reason for cameras. They promote civil behaviour.
Since I installed a visible security camera above my front door I never had couriers throwing packages, they very rarely not show up and claim "no one was home" and so on. Also I had a neighbour damage my fence every single time he was doing his farm work (plowing, harvesting). In addition he would use an unfenced portion of my property as a turning place leaving deep/huge tire marks and did other silly shit like that despite me asking him many times not to do it. Once I installed cameras it hasn't happened once.
Then there are other practical reasons, I can review the recordings to find out which way my cat went if he is gone for a long time, or I can check is he waiting in front of the door in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed. Also my cameras resolved a mystery how one of my cats got injured once (hint - deer really don't like cats).
Finally, let's say there is a huge storm forecast and I'm away. I can check remotely everything is fine.
Finally, cameras are very good for insurance purposes. At least in my country insurers are known to weasel they way out of paying very often. If you have an actual recording that is much more difficult for them to do.
The only issue I have with most reasonably priced Cctv cameras is that they go towards more megapixels when they should go towards more IR sensitivity. Almost every consumer grade camera can be defeated at night if a subject is moving quickly. The picture will be smeared. So for ID purposes I use lower resolution more "professional " cameras.
As for open source, I've been using ZoneMinder with local (and on camera) AI for ages.
Dunno much about the market for consumer grade home mount IR/Thermal cameras, I used to use upcycled industrial cameras when I worked contracts in the vision domain, recently I'm using a rifle scope on a remote controlled mount with a long HDMI cable.
Mars MT1000LRF Thermal Riflescope:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/ThermalHunting/comments/1i8wlpp/tho...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBHHCRHnwgw
> They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
Oh wow, I didn’t know I felt that way! I’m glad you were able to tell me what I feel.
You are making a lot of assumptions about why people have them.
People have different dispositions, live in different environments with different levels of support from law enforcement and face different threats. I live in a remote area and am regularly away for extended periods of time. I’ve spent years with and without any security cameras and I’m generally more content when I have a few keeping an eye on the place.
This! And also, cameras are not just useful to monitor criminal threats. If you’re away from a property for long periods of time, they are also helpful to monitor for weather damage, misdelivered packages, animal activity, etc.
What do you do when you're away and something happens?
What if you're away and the feed dies?
I’d assess the urgency of the situation and deal with it however I feel appropriate?
Alright mate, I'm not probing your defences. I'm just wondering how much peace of mind you get at a distance.
I mean, are you flying home if a misdelivered dog gets struck by lightning on your lawn?
And how urgent is a blank feed? If not "drop everything" (even though it's probably nothing) then what's the point?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I don't have cameras as a crutch for an anxiety disorder, I use them to solve property management problems. If there is something that needs to be addressed, I do so. This may or may not require my involvement depending on the issue. If a camera breaks (which isn't common), I order whatever parts that may be required if any, and fix it when convenient.
A broken camera gives you exactly the same information as a camera that doesn't exist: zero information. If this gives someone enough anxiety that they would need to drop everything, they probably need therapy.
I was wondering about the events you're monitoring home for while you're on holiday. Were you saying something more like cameras mean you don't have to do your usual rounds on foot?
Regardless, when I said "blank feed" I meant a scenareo where you're away and you don't know why the feed is blank. It's not the same as a non-existent camera: it's telling you there's a mysterious problem. Can you ignore the chance that it's an extremely urgent problem?
The cameras that people have on their homes are not necessarily places that they are at on a regular basis. Some homes are vacant, some are secondary homes, some are vacation homes, some are rentals, etc.
I've had a couple failures over the past ~decade and it has never been "mysterious". If you don't panic and use context clues, there is always plenty of information. Pretty much any foreseeable urgent problem resulting in a failure would have produced some footage that indicates the issue. And non-urgent problems that result in failure are easy to detect. (e.g. if your UPS sends you an on-battery alert, and 5 minutes later your cameras fail, you just had a power outage)
The only time that cameras go black without warning and it is warranted to panic is when you're the comic relief character in a bad horror movie.
[flagged]
Please don't post snarky comments like this on HN.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
OK, thank you
You’re right that I don’t. But I gave you the courtesy of an answer, so I’m not sure why you are being hostile about it.
I don't see courtesy or an answer in your comment. I see a refusal to answer, in a condescending tone. I explained myself in good faith and you chose to educate me about the existence of property portfolios, following up with how, actually, my question is stupid.
You refused to accept even the premise of any thing I've said. I believe I have matched your respect, but hopefully with more zing.
Yes. The vast majority of utility for me has nothing to do with criminals lol.
My doorbell has a camera that records locally.
When the doorbell rings I get a notification on my desktop and phone with a relevant image captured a few moments before the button was pressed.
Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my pants on for.
Mostly it's just fun and easy to add cameras around your house. Then you can do stuff like have the LLM count birds it sees or ask it "are the dogs in the back yard" etc.
>Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my pants on for.
Or if it's Jehovah's Witnesses, something you need to take your pants off for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPS2zupOI_Y
I've got two and will probably add a third.
The one pointed at the driveway sends an alert to my phone when someone visits. It's handy because I can't hear the house from my office so I often don't realize when we have guests over.
The one in my back yard is for security. I don't obsess over it, but if something went missing from my workshop I'd check the recordings. I'm not worried about traditional thieves, but I've got a couple unsavory family members.
> Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them?
The point of Frigate et. al. is to not have to do the monitoring. The false positives of small wildlife, known persons/vehicles, etc. do not consume attention, so you forget about it until something of actual interest happens.
Like with all home automation, you should use it to solve problems you have, not problems you want to have.
Here are some ways I use security cameras:
Check if my colleagues are in the office or not (and if they are in the middle of a live recording). Check on my plants while I'm away. Check if there is a free parking space. Check if I left something at home or in the office.
I'm not really thinking about crime, even though they are called 'security cameras'.
I'm so happy those uses of camera's are illegal in the EU. Camera's at work can only used for safety. You could have other - less intrusive - systems in place for all tge other issues.
Isn't the entire EU essentially a panopticon of cameras?
Panopticon for the State, not for you.
You have to justify the use of storing (or publishing, don't remember) content that includes PII. You must register the use of cameras and specify how long and why you store those recordings. Which usually states: For security purposes. You must include (at least my country) a sticker that says particular area under surveillance.
When there is collective photographing at school for children, we as parents must consent with a signature... which is a little bit annoying.
Having camera at home/yard is no issue.
Having camera at home/yard is no issue
Only if the camera is angled in such a way that it only sees your property. A door bell camera that can also see the public road in front your house for example is technically not allowed, even if most people ignore that rule.
Just one of many bizarre European attitudes towards work and capitalism which are contributing to massive underperformance economically.
Why would anyone have any expectation of privacy at work other than in the toilet?
Because privacy is a basic human right. Europe still has some of those.
I don’t get it, you have privacy at home or outside work, why when someone is paying you to work for them there is an expectation of privacy? You don’t see how that is extremely counterproductive for capitalism and economic activity?
Just don’t come to work right? You can have all the privacy you want? Or don’t visit the business if you are the customer.
Please help me understand what the logic and justification is to regulate and control security camera use within private enterprises (with the obvious exception of toilets and changing rooms etc)?
My employee can intrude on my privacy when he had probable cause but only then. Otherwise it is illegal to collect personal data. I need mutual trust to be productieve and evaluation of my work should always be upfront and transparant.
Otherwise I'm puzzled by your claim of productivity. Especially since we are stalking about labour productivity.
Notice that the top tier of the list is populated by countries with strict privacy laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...
> “There is a fundamental shift in how nations approach economic output. Strong social policies and strategic investment in worker well-being are creating more productive economies than traditional long-hour work cultures. The financial sector remains a key driver of high productivity, but it’s the emphasis on work-life balance that distinguishes the leading economies."
https://businessday.ng/news/article/top-10-most-productive-c...
We're past the industrial revolutionaire for while. A happy pig is a fat pig, one could say :-)
I work from home half of the time. I have clear targets. Some I set for my team, some are set for me. If I reach or surpass my targets, why should I be spied on constantly?
This is about security cameras at work sites and businesses. What does this have to do with WFH?
However while we are on the topic I don’t see why governments should impose any restrictions on businesses using monitoring systems on their WFH technology systems as long as it is disclosed to the employees they may be monitored.
When you are paid by an employer your job is to do exactly what they want and try to do it well. Your relationship is voluntary (at will) between both parties and if you don’t like it then don’t work for them.
You were mentioning productivity as a reason for motoring your every move at work. Productivity is not a valid reason.
The reason the can't use video footage is because your image is biometric data.
There are other ways of monitoring at the workplace without being so privacy invasive.
My team is set free. We don't have work hours. Technically we have to work 3 hours a day, between 10:00 and 12:00 and between 13:00 and 14:00. Without any monitoring they've reached their yearly target in may of this year.
So productivity is a falsehood. Nobody works harder when they're watched. People work hard when they are valued.
Fair performance reviews now and then do the job.
Then back on safety. I used to work in a bar years ago. It was in a busy part of the city and out of 30+ bars on the square I was the last to close. I had 3 cameras and they were installed for my safety. Imagery was erased every morning and only used when needed after a bar fight or theft. That's fair use.
Never use biometric data lightly.
On a sidenote. I just don't get why people want to live in a surveillance state so much. You can't build a society without trust.
Your argument is like “If we don’t do covid testing, we’ll have no covid cases”
You can integrate it with home assistant to send notification on your phone (or run any other automation) when it detects any specified objects.
I have set it to send me notification if any person is detected in my front yard, drive way or back yard after I have "armed" my alarm at night. I am thinking of also sounding am alarm on my home speakers.
Frigate, when configured properly, has a really low false positive rate. I have only seen 2-3 false positives in the past one year. And if rarely ever misses. So it's something you can rely on.
We had a couple of minor break-ins in our neighborhood, and subsequently installed 3 very visible cameras along the neighborhood road (which is a dead end). No break-ins since.
My neighbor used his to catch a guy that let his dog poop all over the sidewalk. Like a trail of 10 poops over 6 meters. When caught days later he denied it, but the neighbor whipped out his phone and showed him the video. He apologized.
Most satisfying ise of CCTV ever. NGL it made me want to install them.
>Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them?
Very few people rarely ever actively monitor their home security cameras these days. I only look at the recorded footage if and only when a predefined event is triggered. Usually if a person is detected within a specific area when I'm not at home and they shouldn't be there. Such as door leading into the house from the backyard. Or if a package is delivered and I don't see the package on my doorstep.
In my previous apartment, the landlady had zero sense of decency and would let herself in to snoop around.
I use these devices because I can factually know that nobody has entered my home while I was gone. It is peace of mind. I don't think about burglaries or whatever. I think about how my landlord or a property manager or rotating cast of anonymous maintenance people have a key and the only reason they don't abuse it is because of decency.
I get notifications when packages are delivered which limits the window for porch pirates.
I have a daily news feed of animal activity so I can see what the little neighborhood cats, raccoons, and skunks were up to last night. I was originally using it to alert me when the neighborhood stray was on the back porch so I could come down and feed her (without risking other critters finding the food)
I am installing a doorbell one this week. I got a package delivered monday according to the tracker but its not here. It would be nice to have had the camera already so I could see if someone took the package or if its still potentially not yet delivered. Neighbors have gotten packages stolen plenty so it is a real risk.
>> Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them?
Have you priced out security systems with live monitoring by a person at a security company? Quite expensive.
I live at 7400 ft in Colorado and only lock my doors so the bears don't come in. I have cameras on each side of the house so I know when not to let my dogs out.
Cats, just for my cats.
You mean to make sure they don’t get out of the house?
I would love to ditch things like locking car, home, hiding stuff, etc, but unfortunately there are individuals (a way less than 0.2% of people) that makes us to…
Interesting, I've never actively thought this, but I think this is why I've never gotten security cameras.
Do you have any specific links to studies you recommend looking at?
I got robbed by a friend and lost something very sentimental, if i had the security camera set up would have actually had evidence of it.
There are other use cases, me for example use it to monitor a family member that has epilepsy and needs to checked from time to time.
Personally, I've them installed outside as a deterrent. Thankfully, I can't prove if they work or not, but that is the intent.
The anti social behaviour, fly-tipping and the cutting down of my trees by my neighbours stopped once I installed CCTV
>> Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt insecurity.
I am fascinated by this whole thread because I have multiple cameras trying to capture hummingbirds, coyotes, and foxes in my backyard. We try to ring an alert when they come so we can quickly run to the window and be inspired by their grace and beauty.
Currently i'm doing this via a very flimsy RPI+webcam setup but i'd like something much better. I also have FLIR cams because im interested to do this with night vision also.
I'll take this a step further. I don't understand why so many people are installing security cameras at all. And my observation has been that there's often an inverse correlation between how much someone needs such a camera and how likely they are to have one. It's always the suburbanites who are talking about their Ring cam footage and freaking out that someone's at the door, oh wait, it's just FedEx.
Despite what most people seem to think, crimes like break ins in the US are extremely rare. Why do people still feel the need to gear up their homes like Fort Knox?
It's not for deterring break-ins. It's just for informational purposes like seeing when my package is dropped off. FedEx might be pretty good at sending me emails about deliveries but plenty of other smaller last-mile couriers don't have any way of notifying me. It's also for entertaining purposes like seeing a feral cat stretch in my front yard.
Burglars hate them
Frigate has really done a fantastic job packing everything together.
For basic needs go2rtc [0] or MediaMTX [1] can be enough. But once you need some form of intelligence on top AFAIK unfortunately there is no unixiy tool that can take a stream and easily define and apply a model on it. You will have to code something in python.
- [0] https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc
- [1] https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx
I am using Motion [0] since years. At least for basic stuff, is easy to configure and very flexible. For more advanced configuration, it required a bit of tuning.
[0] https://motion-project.github.io/
Yes motion is amazing and has been around for a quarter of a century ! very lightweight and reliable.
As far as I know you can do object detection and tracking by gluing it with a yolo model using a few lines of python like this [0]. I saw a bunch of people doing this.
I really wish there was a more unixy tool available in package managers doing this.
- [0] https://github.com/xj25vm/MotionSpot/blob/main/motionspot.py
Exactly. Motion can detect objects in the images, but not recognize the object type, but it's easy to integrate with a third party services like the one that you are linking with the scripts features [0]. I have personally integrated with S3 and self-hosted notification to create a small CCTV system, but there is no limit to the imagination of possible integrations.
- [0] https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...
I run Frigate with 5 IP cameras (3 Hikvisions, 2 Amcrests) and 1 USB camera. I'm using a USB Coral TPU, which does a good enough job that Frigate can keep up with an average of only 30% CPU usage on an old Dell with 4 core i7-6700.
Frigate's better than anything else I tried, but not perfect. As mentioned in another thread, it has some issues with codecs from some cameras (playing clips from Amcrests is fine, Hikvisions not so much) and therefore you may need to transcode. Also it has no built in option for sending your recorded clips offsite; theoretically you could mirror its storage directory, but as far as I've found it's not organized in a way that you can separate just important events.
is it possible to not just recognize people but identify them? (with registered pictures beforehand ofc)
Yes: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/releases Ctrl+F: "Face Recognition"
> Turn on face recognition & upload your first face via Face Library → Add Face.
> Train and improve accuracy: New detections appear in Face Library → Train with a confidence score-assign each to a new or existing person to refine future recognition.
Neat, I currently use Frigate with Doubletake and Compreface for facial recognition. Perhaps I can simplify it a bit
I also ran Doublestake and Compreface with Frigate. Found out that it didn't really provide any benefits for me. The default native person detection in Frigate using the TPU is more than adequate. I've seen some interesting stuff people have done using a mix of locally hosted LLM vision model with Home Assistant and Frigate to do image interpretation. Including facial recognition and License plate reader. It's something I want to eventually explore.
Where would I start if I wanted to do stuff on a video, but not necessarily live? Like, say I have a 5h video and want to extract the frames of each car passing when it's at a certain spot, for instance. Or all of those with a driver holding a phone or whatever. Are there good frameworks for this, or would I have to split the video into a million frames and run something on each one?
I'd check out the OpenCV documentation and examples. This is basically what I use for face recognition in videos[0]; for recognising cars or other objects, you'd probably want to either train your own model or use something like OpenCV's YOLOv3 (example: [1] but you'd need to steal the video reading code from the first link[0])
[0] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition/blob/master/exa...
[1] https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectD...
Thanks. Also just kinda wondering if there's been any leaps lately, as I guess this is the same way as one would have done it a few years ago as well. But now that one can upload images and chat about them to multi modal LLMs, wondering if there's easier ways now (but preferable not uploading a million images to chatgpt api and paying the cost).
Like, could I avoid training or specifying much or becoming very knowledgeable in this domain, are we there yet?
Could I say "detect the frames of every car when it passes position X in the video, and then grab the frame when the same car passes position Y", and then I could calculate the frame difference to know the speeds. Or would I have to do loads of code and training still for something like this?
(I know I'm asking for much here, just curious what the SOTA is in this right now)
Ask a decent (non-free) AI this question, and I bet it can make you a python script to load a video and output which timestamps show a driver holding a phone.
I also don’t know, but this might be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Look_Once
My step brother has been asking me to help him setup a load of cameras for watching his marron ponds. he has foxes, crows and humans stealing from his ponds.
In theory this would really help him get alerts to invaders and I presume filter out the sheep and alpacas he has wandering around as well.
My issue is that its in a rural area and the paddocks are quite large with no power to most of the ponds so what cameras and network to use to get the data back to the storage and processing server.
Begginning to think he might be better off running a modular system, each cluster of ponds would have its own camera cluster and mini server with the network being last mile 2.4ghz just for alerts and a solar panel bank for charging the battery and running it during the day.
What would I get away with here? N100 mini device? processing maybe 6 cameras?
Right now I am using Eufy Solocam S220 cameras to monitor wildlife around my place. They are solar powered cameras that only need a couple hours of sunlight each day to keep the battery topped off. In my experience over the last 4 months if it is cloudy and the camera needs to run on battery alone it will use 2-3% of the available charge per day so that means that the camera will function for extended periods with no sunshine.
I appreciate the local storage option on this camera. It will also use the HomeBase series local storage devices if you want to do that. These are WiFi cameras so you need to install an app on your phone and then set them up on your network and then you will be able to see videos in near real-time. The delays that I see are about 5 seconds though I haven't measured.
The detection settings can be tailored from low to high. With mine in place I can regularly monitor insect activity for insects as small as 1 cm moving across the field of view if the sensitivity is set to middle setting. It will detect beetles, ants, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, centipedes, spiders, etc. I have multiple videos of animals including deer, raccoon, opossum, fox, rabbit, rat, two species of mouse; also reptiles like lizards, and a snake; also birds including roadrunners, cardinals, wrens, chickadees, mockingbirds and others.
The night vision works well too. I don't mind being awakened at 2 am to watch a fox nosing around. I had seen the tracks several times over the years and my neighbor said that they saw it moving back and forth across his place but I had never seen it alive and moving until I got that camera. Pretty great.
That model camera may not work for his needs. It only has a 2X zoom. Eufy does have other solar models that use cellular network I think. I will likely upgrade to 4K models later with higher zoom and use one of their HomeBase storage devices since they can store up to 16TB if you provide the disk.
I haven't used their AI since it trains on local data on a HomeBase and I don't yet use a HomeBase. It does work though since one of my relatives has several different model Eufy cams and a HomeBase and they tagged photos to train for people and set up exclusion zones and it all works for them.
All in all I am glad I chose Eufy cams over standard game cameras. It ends up being less expensive and near zero hassle to use them.
I have the earlier eufy stuff at home, the viewing distance is nowhere near whe he needs let alone the wifi network range. (Cam 2 Pro, and Cam 2C) just looking at the S220 i dont think it would be much better in terms of range. but the solar cam idea is worth thinking about.
Thanks for your insights
The solar charging/recharging cam is the way to go. That was my #1 consideration since mine are deployed too far from any infrastructure and using a battery game camera just adds to the maintenance load.
I chose the inexpensive S220 cams because they fit my use case but I would expect that for your use case a different model would be needed. Here at my place I can use WiFi cams and do the nature monitoring with the only consideration or parameter that I have as a constraint being that the camera needs to be installed in a location that gets a minimum of 2 hours of sunlight daily on average.
When I first deployed one of my cams I had it in a non-optimum orientation, facing NNW instead of South so that the panel did not get direct sunlight at all. In that orientation working from a full charge on utility power pre-deployment I used the camera for two weeks before I redeployed it at the same location facing SSE. My initial plan was to position it using the Eufy mount installed on a post and the only post was N of the location I needed to monitor. After watching the battery charge cycle I determined that it would eventually discharge and require a utility top-off. I redeployed the camera on an old, cheap camera tripod a few feet from the initial location facing SSE so that the solar panel got adequate sunlight and in a matter of a few days it was topped off again.
I really like the solar powered cameras. They add flexibility to any deployment plan.
I've been running Frigate for many years, using a PN50 NUC and a Coral USB dongle, the Coral is a must, at least in my case. I had a full blown Ubiquiti/Unifi setup with cameras + their software. Way to many false alarms compared to Frigate. Now I run 10+ cameras with 24/7 recording and alarms with images pushed to Telegram. The identification is instant as well as the telegram message.
Running a mix of Ubiquti/TP-Link VIGI+TAPO/Reolink. I'm running everything in containers and everything works perfect!
Polling HN: is there any upgrade to Coral? It's 5 years old at this point, and with the explosion of AI apps & HW acceleration, I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be anything to update Coral's niche, of an IO-attached NPU.
For on-camera AI, I'm aware of OpenMV https://openmv.io/ and their recently-kickstarted N6 & AE3 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae...
OpenVINO might be a good alternative, as many Intel-based mini pc’s support it. Or a decent desktop with an Intel CPU. Or maybe something with an Arc GPU (integrated or dedicated).
Disclaimer: I didn’t try it yet but the last rabbit hole regarding OpenVINO comparisons looked too good to be true and it seems Frigate supports it too. Win-win.
TIL openmv.io, looks really neat for small project. Especially cool with the thermal vision, that would be a very nice addition to improve false positives for <living-things> detection.
But for surveillence, it's usually the sensor/camera quality that is the most important. I've struggled hard to find an affordable IP camera that can actually handle both shutter speed + quality in order to for example read license plates.
a) How many LAN cameras b) How many WiFi cameras
are you using with only one Coral USB dongle at the same time (plugged in the PN50 NUC) and get successful object or person identification with frigate? And why telegram? Is it connected to frigate only for notifications resulting from the identifications?
a) 8x PoE cameras b) 2x WiFi cameras + sometimes some esp32cam etc.
Yes, only one Coral dongle and it's handles all cameras perfectly. With some masks I rarely get any false positives and it is like 99% correct hit-rate.
Telegram is just a way to get a fast glance of an detection, so it sends me an image with what type of detection it was and the frame it found it in with detection frame around the object. This is handled via Home Assistant and some automation I've written. The results comes via mqtt to hass.
Echoing what most users have said, running frigate last 4 years. Early adopter. Cool thing is you can technically run webrtc from nest webcams via HA into Frigate. I run frigate without Home Assistant, but recently added home assistant back so I can pipe webRTC thru HA plugin to frigate. Now I dont need to pay for nest aware.
The title is misleading, you get that "full local" just with the default install and model. And the default model sucks, for example this is a "person alert": https://imgur.com/a/uDCCTjr, this is just funny https://imgur.com/a/pP4ZvQI
I have a love/hate relation with Frigate, I use it since 2 years but since the business model of the developer is provide a "good model" using a custom one is not possible (at least not in a easy ways AFAIK).
I use my cameras to track a family member with a medical condition, this is why I do not feel confortable uploading those image to the "Frigate+" service to eventually get better training.
I'm probably being dense here, but could you please explain your first image link? Assuming you didn't accidentally link the wrong image, I'm struggling to see how even a not-very-good model would think that's a person, and it doesn't look like a security camera screenshot like your second image does.
Is not the wrong image. I got a notification (thru Home Assistant) because Frigate detected that group of toy horses as a person. I tried to find the image where the box is visible but only found that preview.
Edit: I found a better place to make an screenshot https://imgur.com/a/5qpDWia There you can see the event marked as "Person"
Frigate, Doubletake + Compreface is 100% local
Person you're replying to mentioned Frigate+ which is the paid subscription option offering the ability to upload images to their servers in order to further train the models to get better accuracy, so no longer 100% local.
Maybe you're suggesting that using two additional tools in combination with the free version of Frigate brings its quality up on par with that of an extra-trained Frigate+? If that's so it would be great if you could say that and elaborate how so / why, rather than just dropping in some new tool names and no explanation as to how/if they address GP's points. (Thanks in advance if you do come back and explain.)
Edit: I just looked into Doubletake + Compreface, seems they're both facial recognition tools, so using them wouldn't overcome the problem GP commenter reported that Frigate without Frigate+'s additional training doesn't do a good enough job of general object tagging for them?
As an alternative, you might also want to check out scrypted which offers a lot of cross-integration features and hardware optimized local AI processing (eg on MacMinis M*). Developer is super responsive in the discord.
Frigate has been great for me. Been using it for couple of years in a Unraid server with 8 cameras connected. Mix of Eufy and Tapo cameras. Only downside is that it doesn't have a IOS/Android application yet. So for now, I just use the frigate web UI as PWA on IOS. Then access it on my local network via VPN once I receive a notification.
Google Coral Accelerator is basically abandoned these days though
Luckily Frigate works with a ton of different accelerators, like the Hailo, Intel's iGPU, even some Arm GPUs now too.
I have it running on an Orange Pi 5 with the Rockchip NPU, very impressed with that being supported and working so well for object detection.
single camera?
Two cameras, CPU usage is very low (NPU spikes when there’s movement). I suspect I could add more without too many problems.
wow.. thats sounds very promising.
Can you recommend a quality online community that do the same thing that I could lurk in for while to soak up some knowledge??
The documentation is rather scarse on performance numbers, but it looks like the hierachy of price/performance is like Intel iGPU ("free"), Intel A310, Nvidia GPU.
I'm explicitly leaving out the Coral TPU, since it's been reported that the newer Intel CPUs (Core Ultra) seem to provide the same performance with it's iGPU.
Still works with frigate, although I've heard that modern (whatever that means) CPUs can do as good a job as the Coral TPU, making it somewhat redundant.
I ain't running it on a modern CPU though, so I'm happy with the Coral.
Anecdata: i5-6500 did recognition in about 15ms, Coral TPU (M2 variant) does it in about 7.5ms - so… probably could’ve done without it in hindsight…
Frigate's docs has some detection speeds listed: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#openvino .
I believe it also has an advantage of being able to run bigger models like YOLO-NAS. Going off Frigate+ documentation: https://docs.frigate.video/plus/#supported-detector-types
+1 to using Frigate. I've had it running on my home server for a couple of years and it has served us very well. Detect is running on an old GTX 960 I had laying around, and it works a charm (though I'll probably run out of legroom once I bring up more cameras).
One of the big advantages is that I can pick and choose which camera I use, and then segment it off on it's own firewalled VLAN so it's only talking to my server applications. That lets me know that its not phoning home, and I can run PoE cameras that are immune to wifi jammers.
The idea that the surroundings of my house aren't being beamed straight into an Amazon datacenter somewhere is particularly satisfying.
What is the best outdoor wifi camera (ideally with a solar panel, so no wires) that works with Frigate. I see Tapo and Eufy mentioned in the comments, but do folks here have favorites?
I'm looking for outdoor + wireless, primarily for wildlife watching.
Related to this, I use this script to setup a live stream of my cameras on a debian system connected to a little monitor
https://gist.github.com/neontuna/d1ba0c771aa89c42910f21c0aae...
I didn't like having to fire up some NVR software just to get the camera live stream, and you're locked into whatever options that software might have. With ffmpeg you can do some cool stuff with filters.
The new style of "Open source;" I wonder what kind of fun secrets are hidden in the model and Coral Accelerator.
Unfortunately, the USB Accelerator is very hard to buy even at 3x retail.
You dont necessarily need the Coral device. I'm running frigate on an Intel N200 CPU with one camera, it uses OpenVINO for GPU accelerated detection, and consumes about 10% CPU.
I use Ubiquiti Protect Cameras and recently bought a AI key[1] which adds license plate and facial recognition features to all cameras even non-AI enabled models. It works really well and of course all 100% self-hosted.
[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cameras-nvrs/product...
Does the AI key work for more than one camera at a time?
Yes, up to 4 I believe. Do note, the AI Key does not support LLMish feature search phrases and some limited advanced AI features that the AI Key does. However, the AI Key is $799 and the AI Port is $199 so for me personally not worth the huge increase in price.
I don’t get the appeal or desire of a 24/7/365 perimeter camera system on a _personal_ home. Society has truly gone downhill if individual homeowners need surveillance tech to appease their own fears in a _suburb_.
At most, I would really only need a front door video camera that acts as a door bell. One of the things I miss most about my older apartment was the keyless entry and ability to virtually answer the door.
How far out of a major city would I need to live for my fears to become rational and my lust for surveillance to be justified, in your opinion? Beyond the wall?
Oh i've been using frigate with a Coral-usb stick for a couple of years now and the project has been progressing nicely.
It has a very nice integration with homeassistant.
This is cool and it amazes me how the “big” home security companies don’t have this. My Ring cameras false detect all the time. The front will detect the flag as a person when it blows in the wind. The rear gets triggered by the pool robot skimmer. As much as I’d love to try this, I don’t have the time. It would be great though if it was built into something I could buy.
Is this capable of doing something, like, telling if someone is standing in a bathroom? Is it capable of determining if they're specifically in the shower? It sounds like this is based on weird snooping goals but it's just the example that comes to mind in terms of its ability to tag whats happening in video/image.
Side note. I’m surprised we’re not doing more with LLMs as far as image and video processing. We now have some level of imaging understanding in a box (and some common sense). Seems like there would be millions of possibilities.
Is manufacturing using it for anything? More security applications?
Frigate has been an overweight nightmare for me to work with. Trying to detect wildlife that are not in their classification models is basically impossible. I've been better off using motion / motioneye for a lightweight and practical approach
yeah - i've been using it for several years. it's got some issues: fails to detect cars and trucks at night (apparently it doesn't know what to do with the moving headlights); also frequently fails to detect me walking past the camera with my 4 small dogs on our morning walk; confuses farm equipment for cars and continues to record even when the object is stationary. still it's better than most of the other software i've tried.
I'm using frigate and it is really nice, though they could improve the object detection and maybe stop changing the configuration format every year
If you want to start just remember to avoid h.265 cameras so you don't need to transcode since few clients and browsers support it.
I disagree regarding the choice of codec. Currently, I have no issues receiving, saving, and viewing H265 streams. Any modern CPU/GPU can handle them natively (I use a 2018 Intel CPU w/ QSV), any modern desktop or mobile device (I use both Android and iOS) can stream it, and the recorded video takes up less space. What are you using that requires transcoding?
If like myself you're a Linux and Firefox and Android user, H.265 support is extremely lacking; you're probably ok on a modern Android, but you'll not be able to view any of the streams or do scrubbing etc on desktop in Firefox, nothing video related is going to work in the Frigate UI, you won't be able to preview videos etc and will have to download them and use VLC. This might not sound like an issue, but it's a huge pain in the arse if you actually want to use it day to day.
All in, H.265 is unsuitable if you use a specific set of software/tools that is quite a common combination; Linux/Firefox/Android.
The original commenter is correct, if you're one of these people like myself, avoid H.265 like the plague until support is better and be sure to buy cameras that also support H.264.
For Hikvision sourced cameras, previews and exports work, but you can't play clips without transcoding. Unfortunately I haven't found a transcoding option that doesn't completely swamp my CPU (with 3 cameras) so I'm living without ability to play clips right now.
What is the cheapest way to do something like this in a DIY way with FOSS? Assuming you have to buy the computer, and any other hardware. Assuming also near real-time processing and reasonably high accuracy.
What your "stack" of open source cameras and dvr?
I picked up a bunch of 4k POE "simicam" cameras from AliExpress for 25 euros each. These serve up RTSP streams to frigate. I made some minor frigate config changes - I set it to keep 7 days of full recordings (just because i am paranoid), so this uses approx 1Tb of storage (5 cameras currently, more to go online soon). Frigate is running on an old laptop with a Coral AI USB and 2Tb NVME for storage. I enabled detection of cars and animals as well as the default of just humans. It works pretty well, but has some annoying quirks, e.g. if a dog runs past where a car is parked it will trigger an alert for both a dog and a car. It also detects weird conglomerate shapes as human sometimes, e.g. a bucket left at the end of some rolled up bird netting with some pieces of timber sticking out underneath can be vaguely human shaped when viewed from a height. I run the free open source version, and I'm sure I could get better results if I played with the configuration more.
How is that simicam doing at night?
Its hit and miss to be honest. They do have a day/night mode. One camera is indoors in a shed - it picks up moths (as birds) and even a bat a couple of times. One camera that is outdoors regularly detects the fox that visits us almost every night. However another camera pointed at his next destination never picks the fox up at all. The main difference between the two camera environments appears to be third party lighting - there are street lights in the direction of the one that does not detect the fox, and also the glow of a robot mowers charger light. One or both seems to be putting off the cameras ambient light sensor and prevents night mode from kicking in. The simicams do have some configuration for night mode also, none of which I have tried out yet. Options like infrared lamp vs white lamp vs dual, and day-night mode of "photoresistor" vs "scene brightness" and also some "color to black luma" and "black to color brightness" settings. I should really play with those some more, but they've been left as defaults so far.
I have a cheap 25 euro PoE cameras from aliexpress that gives decent video quality. The night vision though is lacking in comparison to one Brillcam that I have. The cameras are connected to a cheap 20 euro PoE switches that advertise being able to put out 60W of power.
For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007391354252.html?spm=a2...
I also plan to install Corall M.2 card within the unused M.2 SSD card slot.
OpenIPC is an alternative open firmware for your IP camera. OpenIPC is an open source operating system from the open community targeting for IP cameras with ARM and MIPS processors from several manufacturers in order to replace that closed, opaque, insecure, often abandoned and unsupported firmware pre-installed by a vendor.
https://openipc.org/?locale=en
Two years with Frigate and zero regrets—local is the way to go!
Go long on Furry Costumes!
I've been doing this with great success for over five years with Camect, so what's new?
I use camect too, but it's blackbox. And I am not sure if it'll be easy for it to handle > 8 8mp cameras.
Otherwise pretty happy.
At a first look? No, or at least not well maintained Home Assistant integration.
Is Camect a self-host solution?
It's local, you have a box in your home. You can use it locally or it can connect with webrtc to pull strean.
Just buy Unifi guys
The Network Video Recorder UNVR is 320€ VAT incl. Does this exist as a software which I can download for free and run in a VM, so that the Unify camera, which would cost at least 100€ can store the data over there?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603
Iam not sure but I think so