Regarding the NVR solution, I personally use both Frigate (Opensource, Free. Fantastic object detection, Really QUICK and accurate detections too), and Blue Iris (Closed source, requires 45$ license. But- amazingly powerful NVR software).
For cameras, I recommend POE cams. I Personally use reolink RLC-520s, and the likes. They support RTMP, RTSP, ONVIF, and will work with any NVR solution worth its salt. They are also quite cheap, and so far, have been pretty reliable. Of the 20 or so I have deployed, I have only had one die- which was due to it catching all of the rain coming off of the roof… in a storm. Warranty was honored on it.
Otherwise- as long as the camera supports one OF… RTSP, RTMP, ONVIF, you should be gold. For doorbell camera, Amcrest has a few options. I have an older AD110. They have newer offerings now. I do believe either reolink or amcrest also makes a POE powered doorbell camera, which would be good, if you have the ability to run POE to your doorbell.
In my experience, Blue Iris’ AI detection (via the free CodeProject AI) works better than Frigate, as it ships with more usable models /whereas you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to get models of the same quality for use with Frigate). There’s a beta version of Code Project AI with support for Google Coral, too.
What’s the advantage of integrating Frigate into Home Assistant? For showing cameras on dashboards, I just use Blue Iris’ UI3 in an iframe. Way less delay compared to Home Assistant’s native video support.
Regarding the NVR solution, I personally use both Frigate (Opensource, Free. Fantastic object detection, Really QUICK and accurate detections too), and Blue Iris (Closed source, requires 45$ license. But- amazingly powerful NVR software).
For cameras, I recommend POE cams. I Personally use reolink RLC-520s, and the likes. They support RTMP, RTSP, ONVIF, and will work with any NVR solution worth its salt. They are also quite cheap, and so far, have been pretty reliable. Of the 20 or so I have deployed, I have only had one die- which was due to it catching all of the rain coming off of the roof… in a storm. Warranty was honored on it.
Otherwise- as long as the camera supports one OF… RTSP, RTMP, ONVIF, you should be gold. For doorbell camera, Amcrest has a few options. I have an older AD110. They have newer offerings now. I do believe either reolink or amcrest also makes a POE powered doorbell camera, which would be good, if you have the ability to run POE to your doorbell.
In my experience, Blue Iris’ AI detection (via the free CodeProject AI) works better than Frigate, as it ships with more usable models /whereas you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to get models of the same quality for use with Frigate). There’s a beta version of Code Project AI with support for Google Coral, too.
I recently gave it a try for a month or so- and switched back to frigate.
At the time, coral support was only in beta, for running on a raspberry pi- so, code project tended to consume quite a bit of resources on my NVR box.
The other factor- Frigate integrates into home assistant effortlessly, Blue Iris is a lot more manual.
But, I can confirm the quality of code project.ai was pretty good. Although, there aren’t as many tools to “tune” it with.
I’ll prob give it another try in the future.
What’s the advantage of integrating Frigate into Home Assistant? For showing cameras on dashboards, I just use Blue Iris’ UI3 in an iframe. Way less delay compared to Home Assistant’s native video support.
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