FRIGATE. An AI NVR with real time object detection. Part 1 - Overview, Install, and Setup.
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- Опубликовано: 1 авг 2024
- In this series, I cover the FRIGATE NVR with AI. This first video is an overview of what Frigate is, how to set up the Home Assistant Add-On and integration, and basic configuration of your first camera.
frigate.yml code: github.com/mostlychris/homeas...
frigate NVR github: github.com/blakeblackshear/fr...
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00:00 Intro
00:44 What is Frigate
03:03 Install the Add-On
04:25 Create the frigate.yml config file
06:15 Detectors
07:35 Start Frigate - Check Logs
08:12 Camera configuration
16:18 Zones and Masks Intro
20:10 Another RTSP path example
21:14 Install Frigate HACS Integration
24:25 Install Frigate HA Integration
25:35 Storage Space Considerations
27:19 Final Thoughts and Wrap
DISCLAIMER: Some of the links above take you to affiliate sites that may or may not pay a small commission to me. It doesn't increase the cost to you, but it does help support me in making these videos.
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Mostlychris
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Thank you so much for this, i've tried many videos and this was the only one that I could get Frigate working with. I'll be jumping straight into the follow up videos.
Outstanding. Make sure you watch the update video I made. I think it's the 4th or 5th one as it has changes to the config file.
THANK YOU FOR THIS!
Thanks for this very extensive explenation. 👍👍
You're welcome!
If your camera is mounted high up, but you still want human detection, you may need to set your detection stream to be a higher resolution. You have to just find that compromise on what your hardware can do. Now it is a year later, you don't need to manually add the repository in HACS, thank goodness. One less step to worry about :)
Thanks for a great video series on Frigate.
Thanks for the updates and tips and thanks for watching!
UPDATE: With the release of Frigate 0.9, there have been some breaking changes in the config file. For example, clips is not a valid option. After this video, make sure you watch my video on version 0.9. ruclips.net/video/bu5gce1YIyc/видео.html
It would have been very helpful if you had pinned this comment. As it is I just wasted an hour redoing my config, everything breaking, re-installing my back up config and then found this comment searching to see if anyone else had problems! Even so really appreciate your efforts and the detail you go into.
@@julian.morgan Thanks for the comment. Agreed on the pin. We are on version 0.13 now so many more changes as well. I have an updated video on 13.
Thank you very much for the video, it's very informational.
You're welcome.
great introduction! thx a lot!
Glad you liked it!
This is interesting! While I'm generally pretty happy with Blue Iris. I don't even mind paying for it. I think it's great software. But, the one thing I dislike is that it only runs on Windows. I hate being forced to run and maintain a Windows machine when Linux is a better solution. So, I'll be constantly keeping my eyes open for a product that is at least comparable with BI but runs on Linux. It looks like Frigate might have a future! Looking forward to your upcoming videos. ~Frank
I have been having fun with Frigate. I think BI is awesome too. However, it requires me to keep a beefy PC running 24/7 and has so many settings it can be overwhelming for some. I can run Frigate on my Odroid N2+ with 5 cameras using a Coral TPU with no issues. That thing will run on backup power longer than the switches that power the cameras.
I know this was a year ago, but you can use both Frigate and Blue Iris. Frigate can take the Blue Iris RTSP feed and use it. You could use this as an option to use both together and see if you can migrate to Frigate. I use to use Blue Iris also, but I really couldn't justify running a high end Windows machine, using that much electricity when Frigate can do a similar job, albeit with a little more YAML work, with lower power and a lot less resource use.
Great video, Thank You. Ran into the same issue where you cannot save to a different drive when using it as a NVR, which would have been handy specially if you do 24x7 recording even on the sub-stream
I REALLY hope this gets solved. I have limited the number of days I keep clips and snapshots so I don't fill my Odroid drive. I also do 24/7 recording on one of my cameras in my original NVR. Having run cameras for the past 6 or 7 years, I now know how much I need to save to catch any incidents that might happen so what I have now is sufficient. I just want that buffer and the 24/7.
Very good
Thanks!
Excellent. I already had Frigate installed and set up, but thanks to your video I found out my camera has a substream. After some fiddling around, I found the url as well... Now my cpu is way less stressed out :-)
Excellent! I'm amazed out CPU savings there is by using a substream.
My exact thoughts too. I had cut the number of cameras I was using down in order to not pin the CPU. Now that I'm using substreams for detection, I'm back up to 7 cameras. I need to find the substream on my Wyze v2 cameras and I'll have all 10 back up. Though I still need to some additional testing to make sure the detection is up to par with the substream.
I'm running this on an Odroid N2+ with 2 Coral TPU's. Thanks for the video Chris, looking forward to the next ones.
I've had good success with the substreams. In fact, they mention in the docs or on forums somewhere that it is better to use those anyway and they are better at detection because of the size of the objects within them. The full resolution streams have to be modified while detecting to see the objects. If I REALLY like this, and so far I do, I might have to get a second Coral if I add more cameras just for good measure. So far, though, I haven't had any CPU issues even running all the other things I have up in Home Assistant.
great video again....like all the others by the way. Using frigate for a while but it would be sooooooooo nice to do 24/7 recording on NAS-share instead of my 128gb mmc media folder
Thanks for the compliment!
Agreed! There has to be a fix for that storage issue at some point. I want more storage space and the NAS is what I would use. I am doing 24/7 on BI for one camera. I have actually turned off BI and it's been off for 3 days just to see if I can live with just Frigate. So far, so good.
@@mostlychris I'm running Unraid, with Frigate running in docker, that way you can add a drive to it for video storage. Home Assistant running in a vm.
Frigate is awesome. I started out by running on just CPU as well and it worked well, but I also bought a Coral to offload the work! With a Coral, you can add a lot of cameras at once and/or really crank up the motion detection settings so it's basically constantly looking for objects instead of just when it sees a good amount of motion! Also, Frigate Person Detection works nicely indoors in Home Assistant as a motion triggering sensor for an alarm integration! No more false alarms (literally) due to pets or shadows or whatever 😁
The Cat and Dog detections are a little wonky though. It constantly detects all my cats as dogs lol
I love it so far. The only issue I have really is the storage and not being able to offload that to my NAS.
My dog sometimes gets tagged as a person and I am sometimes a dog. That was true with BI and Deepstack as well. If only I was allowed indoor cameras.....
@@mostlychris I'm actually running Frigate on my nas, so storage isn't an issue for me. I have an Unraid NAS system that runs docker containers which is where I run Frigate from.
Do you connect your NAS Frigate instance to Home Assistant via the integration and MQTT?
I use proxmox and frigate restart process, please can you explain how to in docker with coral?
@@mostlychris yup
Good videos
Thanks!
So there is a product called pocket AI that has a ada A500 gpu that can connect via usb-c. Do you think this plus frigate, could the ada a500 gpu handle object detection and low light enhancement for an array of cameras?
Or is Frigate specifically designed for tensor?
Interesting video.. I am from UK, there so many PoE cameras and how do I know which cameras will have sub-stream & Rtmp support?
Do it have to be H.264 not H.265?
Interesting clip, this is my first watch.... am interesting in Frigate so i need be more clear on these.... I got mini pc with Home Assistant and am i right add Frigate onto the same mini PC with Home assistant
OR
need other mini PC for Frigate NVR with bigger harddrive (called 'NVR' Mini PC) and link between Mini PC HA to MiniPC Frigate?
thinking of relaxing CPU there.
Correct?
Thank you very much for the video, it's very informational. The "clips" key didn't work and I had to replace it with a "record" key
Hey Wael. There were some changes to the config file after I released this video. I have a version 0.9 video that covers those changes--you are correct in that clips is no longer valid.
If I'm not wrong, you're the only person who solved my doubt about the possibility to use Frigate for 24/7 recording like a real NVR. It looks like there is no way to store 24/7 recording on a surveillance hard drive which makes it so difficult for me to move from moving from blue iris to frigate. Wish there will be a linux version in future so that we can run it as a service in a VM with hard drive mounted. Damn.. I got several coral usb dongles but no way to use it...
I can and do record 24/7 using Frigate. In a later video I talk about that (I think). The only issue was storage but now that I use datactl to move my data directory to an external USB 1TB drive, I don't have space issues.
@@mostlychris Thanks for your reply. I run HA on a virtual machine on Windows, which located on my 250GB SSD. I could use larger SSD to store footage, but 24/7 recording will dramatically reduce the life span of an SSD. Based on my understanding, you installed HA on a USB 1TB drive and footage is store on that drive as well.
@@zht9 I am running HA on my Home Assistant Blue. I just moved the heavy use partition (the data partition) to my USB drive using a program called datactl. This allows me to utilize that drive as storage for Frigate since that is where Frigate is writing it's video and image files.
Great video. There is something I was hoping that you can clarify. In your frigate yml file you have settings for your detection, such as width, height, fps, lined up under ffmpeg. How does frigate know that these settings apply to your detection stream and not your recording stream? In the example on the frigate website they have those settings under detect; which is a role listed by the stream that detects. However, in your config I don't see that so I was wondering how it knows which stream those settings are for?
Hey Richard. There were a number of config file changes after the first video I made. In fact, I think there were further updates to the config. I'll pull my latest config and put it in github. github.com/mostlychris/homeassistant/blob/master/frigate.yml
Hi Chris,
Thanks for yet another great video. Very hands on, and ready to be followed. I got Frigate set up in no time and loving it. But :-) after two days my Blue will no longer start up, and I'm suspecting it is due to a full drive. Have you heard about this before, and if possible, are able to point me in any directions, please? The Blue aquires an ip and is pingable for something like 10-20 secondes before rebooting.
Thanks from Torben in Denmark
Oh no! I haven't heard of this. Do you have snapshots/backups stored off the device? You may have to re-install and restore a snapshot if you can't boot it at all.
G'day Is there any way to use a camera entity (such as camera.front_door) in the frigate.yml? or does it only support rtsp streams? I've got a Nest Door bell now integrated as a camera in HA that I'd love to use with frigate!
A quick search says yes, but you have to go through some hoops. I haven't tried this. I have a Ring doorbell so I can't test.
www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/l962bz/nest_cameras_to_frigate/
thanks again! a question.. im moving to a house.. looking for cameras and the reolink looks great.. due the constrain of chips its dif to get a coral.. its really needed to have a good frigate system?
There are now some other options that you can use instead of a Coral. Check out the Frigate NVR site for the Nvidia GPU and other options. You need to run at least Frigate 0.12 to take advantage. You do need some sort of additional processing power either via a TPU or these new options to really get the best benefit.
When I added the the 1st camera the CPU of my home assistant skyrocketed. I believe I need to install Coral USB Accelerator. Is it compatible with HA based on raspberry Pi4?
You should use a TPU such as the Coral. It is supposed to work with the Pi4.
Good evening, in the clips you can also record the audio?
Frigate disables audio by default because it sometimes causes corruption (according to their docs). You can enable it in the ffmpeg settings. Check out the frigate docs.
Hi, I'm trying to install this on portainer and I keep getting this error.
Error parsing config: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/config/config.yml'
I have no clue where to put the yaml file. Thanks for the help.
Are you using the add-on and running this standalone?
Hi Chris , really like Frigate, but I have some cameras indoors where i only want detection at nights and during the the day switches off, How can i do that ?
Interesting question. There was a profile setting in Blue Iris that would allow that. I have been thinking about a way to do that. One workaround I did with one of my cameras was to put it on a smart power outlet and only turn it on when the alarm set to away. I'll add this to my list of research projects to maybe make a video on.
Looking for a suitable TPU for my pi. Coral USB seems to be globally sold out. What would you suggest as an available alternative?
That's a hard question. I don't know if there is anything out there that will be plug and play for a Pi. Supply chain issues are not happiness!
Finally seeing some Corals on EBay for under $150. The manufacturer may be getting close to shipping, so the scalpers may be unloading.
Hi just adding Frigate to HAS, does the Coral have a 20x42mm form factor for my Intel NUC 11 by Chance?
Please can you explain how to do that in proxmox docker? Because if you try to install Hass os and frigate in proxmox VM, with coral, you have frigate that restart process and you miss a lot of detection.
I don't have that set up personally but a quick search found this: www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/n7nfem/proxmox_hassos_frigate_google_coral_tpu/
@@mostlychris thanks I'll try to ask on Reddit because in the planet is an issue very hard
Good Luck! There is lots of help out there.
Chris, will this work with the Docker Wyze Bridge?
Not sure. I don't have one of those to test with.
can it match Blue Iris performance running non an INTEL NUC ?
If you use something like a Coral accelerator, I think it can. There are so many variables though, such as number of cameras, camera stream quality, use of main stream vs sub stream, etc. I have 5 cameras running sub streams for detection and full res for clips. If there are a lot of shadows and cloud movement, the CPU goes up a bit since its busy with the lighting changes and detection. However, I run NodeRED, Grafana, InFluxDB, AdGuard, VaultWarder, Unifi, and other stuff on the same box and I haven't noticed any bottlenecks with Frigate running. Without the external TPU, it would probably die.
Hello, the new update to HAOS has removed the supervisor button and all that. Its completely removed. Its if they dont want to you to install what you want to it.Any help will be appreciated
The menus have changed to better fit the UI. Stuff is in a different place but it's all still there. Look for Settings on the left. Use the "c" key to bring up the shortcuts menu. let me know if you still don't see what you are looking for.
Hey there. Their config file format has changed. Have you done a new video, or know about one? I think I am mostly configured but would to figure a few things out that could possibly be explained by more understanding the new format.
Also, what file editor are you using?
I have indeed made a new video on the file format changes...if they haven't changed again. Look for the full playlist and it's there.
For file editor, I'm using the built in file editor for some of it and visual studio code for the rest. The config files are visible in VSC using samba directly to the HA box.
@@mostlychris It's visual studio code that I saw in the video. I am playing with it now. I will look for the video on the config changes. I have it all working but still having a few odd issues.
How many cameras could i run on my pi4 HA instance? I’m thinking I need a dedicated machine (or more powerful) to run more than a single cam.
Depends on the camera resolutions and load. It won't be a lot on the Pi4. You'll definitely need a TPU. CPU won't cut it.
@@mostlychris even with a tpu, my cpu loading went up to 40% from 7% on a 5MP
@@TheDiverJim Make sure you are not doing detection on your high quality streams. It only needs a sub stream of lower quality to detect in most cases.
Hello
Is it possible to configure an esp32 cam?
Thank s
Have a good day
Yes. Search esphome.io for esp cam. esphome.io/search.html?q=camera
a few ideas for Remote File Saving.
SSHFS to mount a remote file system locally over ssh and Edit the Docker-compose.yml file...
and symlink is useful for local only
Interesting idea. Is this only on docker installed HA or can you do this on anything?
Hello, can you please update this video with Frigate running on docker using latest Frigate & home assistant - please?
Good suggestion and timely. I JUST moved from my HA Blue running Frigate to my Ubuntu VM in a Docker container. I then reinstalled the integration in HA to point to my Frigate container. Haven't been using the TPU either because the CPU handles it ok (and because I can't get the TPU to be recognized in the VM).
You mentioned there was a place on the internet to find the RSTP syntax for my cameras? Can you give me a link? I can't find the syntax for my Hiseeu bullet cams. It's really crazy making trying to guess what parameters are...
I did a search and found this. Claims to have over 24k cameras listed. security.world/rtsp/
Thank you! @@mostlychris
Thank you!@@mostlychris
So just to be sure, you installed FRIGATE on the same comptuer as your Home Assistant? You are running your home assistant + Frigate on a Odriod n2 + Coral?
He did in this case because he used the Home Assistant addon, which is only available if you install HAOS or the HA application. He would have to install it separately if he used Docker.
off the record ...
I have a Hikvision NVR ... driving 5 cams ... I can rtsp in 3 only for some reason ... do you happen to know why ? I have tried all possiblities here and sometimes some links work sometimes they don`t ..
I`m just wondering if it is worth in ditching the expensive NVR and stay with frigate ( I have a couple of NUC`s running proxmox and docker so I could do with the nvr there)
Can you reliably get to those other 2 cameras using something like VLC to make sure the RTSP link is correct? This helps to rule out an issue with the camera itself or possibly any network issues.
@@mostlychris so if I access my NVR from a i.e. browser (as only this works with hikvision) I can go to camera management and then I get a HTTPS link to each cameras so I can individually connect to each camera from the browser ... It's interesting how the NVR allows you to do this ... They differentiate one from the next via the port so first would be 65501 then second 65502 .. port wise ..
I'm looking though the settings on the ones that don't work via rtsp and settings are the same as the others that work.
Interesting is though even the ones that work don't have the standard rtsp line such as /Streaming/channel/101 and 102 but my ones work only on 104 or 304 or 504 ..
I can't seem to access a substream or possibly the NVR won't allow me to eventhough this is set on camera's settings ...
I might have to disconnect the camera and hook it to my gen 2 24 Poe .. but I don't want to record on anything else other than NVR to be honest .. I would prefer to have these record full time on the NVR as I don't want to keep the Synology busy with useless footage ..
I'm just wondering if I could probably take them all off the NVR phisically and then add them digitally to NVR via rtmp or perhaps scan them viat the network the NVR should detect them ..
Not sure how would this change things.
What NVR are you viewing these through? Are you sure the NVR isn't just displaying this using encoding on its side? The URLs you are talking about--are they the IP address of the cameras themselves or the NVR? When I talk about NVR here, I assume it is NOT frigate. Each camera has specific URLs for the main and substream. At least the HIKVISION cameras should.
@@mostlychris the NVR is a hikvision one. I can get a stream out of the NVR from each camera ;) .. probably only newer nvr's allow for this but if you connect to the NVR via Internet Explorer as the other browesers don't work and go to camera management you can click on each individual camera as the NVR provides a link to each camera ..
So in my frigate I just add the NVR is /Streaming/Ch number but it will only give one stream apparently and for some reason from 5 cams I can only get an image via rtsp from 4 .. I have a ptz with smart tracking some 12 mp and 8mp ones ..
@@TheRealAnthony_real Interesting. I've seen this NVR streaming in IE only because of the protocol used. That is an outdated and terrible option from that manufacturer. Can you go to the camera's IP address and use the ../Streaming/Channel in VLC and see a stream?
These are great tutorials ! I have a huge issue I am trying to solve and I hope you can help. Is there a way to change where Frigate stores files? I have another much larger drive mounted to my VM that I wanted to use for clips
ecordings. I can not figure out how to change where Frigate stores files.... Any ideas??
This isn't possible at the moment. I, too, want to use my SMB mounted NAS. Even though I've got the media directory mapped to my NAS, Frigate still doesn't store anything there. The only way I've seen this work is messing with the underlying docker architecture and that depends on how you have HA installed. I haven't done this myself.
@@mostlychris Shoot. I have home Assistant OS running on a VMware Linux VM. I thought it would be easy to add a Virtual Disk and then use that as my default media file instead. Thanks for the reply and keep up the great videos!
Thanks! Yeah, I am remaining optimistic about getting something in place to allow remote storage.
is home assistant required? can it be installed on Windows?
It is not required. I use it to tie into my automations and other stuff in Home Assistant. I have installed it in Docker as well. You can run Docker on Windows.
Hi there; Fist off all congratulations for this great tutorial .I follow it but I'm syuck because I receive a message error : "ffmpeg sent a broken frame. memoryview assignment: lvalue and rvalue have different structures".I've tried different with and height for the camera ,without sucess .Any idea of what I'm missing .Rgds
Can you give me some specifics on your configuration file, your camera, and what hardware and HA version you are running?
@@mostlychris Hi; Thanks for your feedback; my cameras are Xsecurity a branch of DAHUA ,the software is exactly the same I saw on the tutorial .I'm running HA version 2021.10.4 on PI4 4 GB.The frigate yml is the following:
detectors:
cpu1:
type: cpu
mqtt:
# Required: host name
host: 192.168.2.51
port: 1883
topic_prefix: frigate
client_id: frigate
user: *****
password: ******
# Optional: interval in seconds for publishing stats (default: shown below)
stats_interval: 60
cameras:
# Name of your camera
cam_1:
ffmpeg:
inputs:
- path: rtsp://admin:**********@192.168.30.73/cam/realmonitor?channel=4&subtype=0
roles:
- detect
- rtmp
objects:
track:
- person
Thanks again for your support.
Hi there; update .I achieved to see the cameras if I remove from the YML file the height and the width ;Anyway when I take a look on Frigate UI I have a kind of snapshot ,no movement.To see the "live" I must go to each camera live .Is this normal?
Yes. The main Frigate UI screen only has still images of the cameras. Make sure you watch my update video for version 0.9 that has more options for live view. Also watch the WebRTC and Frigate card videos that talk about live viewing.
@@mostlychris Thanks you do much for tour support
Great video, thank you. You say you boot up on a SD card, and use a SSD for data, I'm wondering, is there a reason why you don't boot up on the SSD too?
Thanks for the compliment! For booting off SSD, I haven't gotten that far yet. So many projects and distractions. Running datactl takes the work off the SD card so that works for me at the moment. Also, when I set this up the "boot off SSD/external drive/etc" wasn't ready for prime time. I haven't checked in awhile so I don't know what the state of that is today.
@@mostlychris Thanks for the answer. I'm pretty new to Homeassistant, and I do bot up from SSD, so I just wanted to know if it was better not to do so, but I understant that you just haven't tried it yet, but you see no problems doing that.
The external SSD option is definitely better than running everything on the SD card. Curious, was that an install option for you--boot directly off SSD?
@@mostlychris well, I got a PI 4, and an Argon ONE M.2 case, but it shouldn't matter how you connect the SSD, I had to prepare the PI for booting on SSD (search RUclips, and you will find) but that was easy, except I had to try a few times and find the right HA version, I think I tried the 32 bit version first, but that didn't work, 64 bit worked fine.
@@pauls8366 Ahh ok. You are doing the way I thought it was being done. I didn't know if there was a newer streamlined install.
What OS do ya'll use?
For Frigate? I am now on Ubuntu running Frigate in a docker container. I use the HA Blue and HA Yellow for Home Assistant.
@@mostlychris I got ot running on UnRaid. Took 28 days. But it doesn't like it when I try to add objects, and recording.
Got one came up on the basics.
@@mostlychris Glad to hear that that setup definitely works, as I also want Frigate on hardware separate from Home Assistant. I’m still trying to piece the details together. (After seeing how much the author has to do just for GitHub documentation, I better appreciate why the instructions write ups are sparse at this point).
I'm having the hardest time getting this to work in HA or Docker.
More details? Jump over to Discord so you can share screenshots, code, etc.
@@mostlychris Joining now. Thanks
5fps really? but why. does it able to handle 30 fps?
It doesn't need anything else for detection unless you are doing high speed vehicle detection. It CAN do more, but takes more CPU at that fps.
Thank you for this! As of this post, your yaml link is dead.
Ugh. I need to host my own. Looks like hastebin got acquired. I moved it to github where I should have put it to begin with.
I do not want IP cameras or wireless. To insecure. Is there a way to use hard wired cameras with a software program like frigate or blue iris?