Thanks Jeff! This 62 year old just started a home lab about 6 months ago. I just added an NVR to the list of things to try because of this video! I especially like the videos of you and your dad!
WOA... not what I expected when I clicked to get here from the link that said: I Spy, with my Little Pi... YES I really would like to replace my 3 hikvision NVR's. This is awesome....
^ Daleks are biological squids in a thicc metal suit. Not even been all that many pure AI enemies in the modern Who-verse(?). Been a couple of robots over the years, like the clockwork robots. Not watched all the old stuff, but google does show a few from old Who.
As an installer here are my questions; A. Can you separate smart activated recording settings from smart activated detections? You may want to always record motion events but you might only want an alert with a specific line-crossing event. B. Probably in your next videos, does it have an app? BB. Remote viewing options on same network and via a remote location. C. Is there a secure way to remote to the device? D. Unifi is breaking camera barriers. The specs I like are: 2K cams (nice balance between function and recording time), Non-pigtail so the RJ45 plugs straight to the base, dimensions similar to Ø3.5 x 2.8". E. Expansion limitations. What is a realistic number of 2K (4MP) cams for this? F. If you could do an overall front end cost and estimate of time to setup with a guide you have. G. Long term mgmt for keeping the system updated? H. Is DHCP running on the PI or via the primary router? ISP changes out a router, can the system roll with it? I hope that helps with some material for the next videos. This super interesting especially for houses and small businesses.
A lot of good questions! A few quick answers (not all): A. I believe using Home Assistant, you can do this-I don't know if Frigate has anything built in for that kind of logic. B. No official app, but most people use it with Home Assistant, which does have an app (I didn't cover that in this video). BB. It has the web UI which exposes individual camera views and a 'birdseye' grid of all cameras. For remote, you'd need to set up some sort of connection like with Twingate, or Wireguard (that's how I do it). E. For the CM4, I'd say 4-6 1080p cameras, or 2-3 4K cameras (if recording 24x7, plus motion detect + single coral). For Pi 5 (or future CM5), maybe double that, especially if you have two Corals. F. Total cost of my system, cameras included, $1-1.5k. Install (not including running cabling) probably 1-1.5 hours, including software setup. First time will take longer as you're learning how to get Frigate set up for your cameras and your needs. G. For updates, so far (only been 6 months in my setup) it's just swapping out a version number in Docker, or running a couple commands to upgrade the Docker container from the old stable version to the latest stable version. Since Docker uses a volume mount for data storage, and in my case, configuration files are also mounted in, as long as the upgrade doesn't require configuration syntax changes, it's quite simple. H. DHCP on my router here-but I believe you can set things up on the Pi if you want to have it be its own little router for the cameras. I haven't done that in my setup, at least not yet.
“For Pi 5 (or future VM5), maybe double that, especially if you have two Corals.” Are you going to try that with this unit and see if your prediction is true? I would be curious to see how much more capable the NVR becomes and if you experience any limitations with the NVR-specific hardware.
Nice setup! A recommendation I've seen for the issue at 17:25 of accidentally writing to the / partition if the HDD RAID doesn't mount is to make the mount point immutable with `chattr +i /mountpoint` (with the mount unmounted), so that any attempts to write will error if the mount is not present.
0:53 "Ignore PEP 668 because it's silly" SO TRUE, it's been such a pain to deal with and in a lot of cases it just doesn't make sense since you'd be doing it for your user and it will not touch rest of the system
Installing packages with --user will still break things. Say you have a system installed program X written in Python that depends on library Y. As your user, you install a different version of library Y with pip. This can break program X, because it will see your user's library Y in preference to the system one, and if they are not compatible, X will no longer run, and you may have no idea why and blame the distro or program. The problem with PEP 668 is that it uses a wrong solution, not that the problem it identified isn't real. What it should have done is made pip create and run inside a virtualenv by default if externally managed is set to true. Things would just work and the user would not need to know or care about any of this.
@@SussyBaka-nx4ge that's what pipx is for, and yeah, that is a real problem. However, most of the software I use is not written in Python and does not depend on it, and those that do either don't break with all of the libraries I've installed, or in rare cases when they do (which didn't happen to me in years) would just print out offending library in the traceback for me to figure.
This is _exactly_ what I've been wanting to do for a couple of years or more. Thanks for all of this! It will really help me up my home monitoring game, especially for my mom's house!
I bought a Coral on a whim during lockdown and had no idea what I wanted to do with it. I stumbled on Frigate last year and gave it a bash on my NUC. Love it!
Really interesting video on DIY devices. As a footnote having the fans being intake rather than exhaust has advantages, you get good flow out passively through holes and the case will be pressurized. This means you can put filters on the fans with only a bit of loss on flow and you'll keep dust out which is important for thermals.
What makes Frigate so good? The AI detection with that Coral TPU. Any NVR will do motion detection, but this takes a snapshot of the motion, feeds it to the AI chip and asks "hey, what's this?" If it's not what you're interested in (person, car, dog, cat) it doesn't record an event. It drastically reduces your false triggers and notification fatigue. Frigate can be difficult to begin with (the documentation is ok, but sometimes disorganised), but once you understand what you're doing it's very rewarding. The end result is nothing short of incredible. 100% worth the time investment to get it working. ...oh, and it's free.
It’s pronounced hi-k-vision. Side note, they are under US sanctions for support they provide to the Chinese government in their mass surveillance in Xinjiang.
The only sanctions they're under is from government contracts or entities that receive government funding. And the sanctions are a joke. You can go with Hikvision or Dahua and have the hard coded CCP back door in your cameras, or you can go with an NDAA compliant camera and have the NSA hard coded back door in your camera. They don't even try to hide it, you can use an EEPROM dumper to dump the camera firmware and see it all. After the initial scare of the US Government "banning" Hikvision and Dahua, most of the supply houses dumped their products like they were cancer, but it wasn't but a year or two after that they started advertising them again, just not NDAA compliant.
HIKVision is banned in a lot of countries. Unfortunately, the company I work for has about 20 of these junk NVRs. The software is total junk. Thankfully we are slowly replacing them with Meraki cameras.
@@Hatch3dLabs While iVMS4x00 leaves a lot to be desired, it's not literal ewaste trash like Meraki. Meraki is a dystopian nightmare of anti-consumer practices, and it's hideously expensive. Cisco nickel and dimes you to death on everything. Vendor lock-in, requiring all sorts of licenses to do anything, no easy way to do local on-site storage. It's also not safe at all. "oops, sorry, your payment information was misconfigured so we shut your cameras off, we don't care about that murder that just happened, toodaloo, no video for you!" Meraki is basically the Apple of the CCTV world. And Hikvision isn't "banned" in "a lot of countries". Many countries have placed restrictions on where Hikvision and Dahua cameras can be used, but the public are not banned from buying or selling them.
I've been running frigate with a TPU for detection for a few years. Couple little wrinkles along the way with breaking change upgrades, but for the most part it's been pretty painless, and works great.
Hi Jeff!! I remember thinking when this video came out “oh nice really proof of concept” but now that I’m packing my apartment to moving to a house I fell here again and this thought “that’s exactly what I need!! Hahaha thanks for sharing. Will play with frigate tomorrow with my cameras to make my version of it
Awesome and good luck! I have Frigate going at both office and home now, been working perfectly for almost a year! I'm going to redo my office setup soon, too! (still Frigate, but with CM5 or Pi 5 and Hailo instead of Coral).
Honestly as soon as you showed the case I went "wow that is really cool" paused the video and I went right to the page to order one. 😂 Thanks a lot Jeff
If the fans were set as exhaust, they'd pull air mostly from nearby vent holes, which wouldn't really do much. With them as intake the airflow over the CM4 will be higher. You can see the flow disparity in the Feynman sprinkler.
Interesting... I think I might do some testing, get temperatures over a day or so, flip the fans, and do it again, to see if it makes much difference in this setup.
I prefer Moonfire NVR over frigate. It's open-source and has the best performance of any NVR software that I've ever used (minimal copy, no re-encode) so it runs smoothly on my PI 2
Oh neat! I was looking around for a simple low-resource-usage NVR and couldn't find any since MotionEyeOS seemed to die off, but I've now added Moonfire to my project, I'll hopefully get to testing it sometime: github.com/geerlingguy/pi-nvr/issues/13
I have multiple Rock64 boards that I have laying around because I have no use for them. Thanks for mentioning the Rockchip Frigate hw acceleration. Now I have a use for them. I have briefly looked into Frigate before in the past but the quick demo sold me on it. Currently, I was experimenting running TinyCam inside Waydroid on a headless DietPi Dell Wyse 5070 using the Cage Wayland compositor. Performance is good, but reliability is not as sometimes Waydroid would be stuck in a bootloop, for which Waydroid had to be relaunched.
Great video Jeff! A trick I learned from The Hook Up's channel (which you touch on) is to use the camera substream for detection and 24/7 recording (if you want that) and to then trigger recording the higher quality stream on a detection event in order to improve performance and also reduce storage requirements. I'm a little disappointed to see blue "tongues" on the usb ports in that chassis if it only supports USB 2, even if there is no "official standard" for indicating the performance of USB ports. Otherwise it looks like quite a nice rack mount solution for a custom NVR build
That's another good tip for performance, especially if you have less storage space. My 8TB should go for a good long while, but for 24x7 recording, you can survive on 1 or 2 TB with the 480p streams.
Fan intake tends to break surface tension, so can pull more heat. The power supply may exhaust, so would tend to not contribute to case heat. So, electronics should run cooler.
Remote NVR location. If this is going to be used for security footage you may want to relocate the NVR away from the network rack as anyone (breaking in), that knows about NVR's will head straight to the rack to get the NVR/Hard Drives. In my case that was an easy project as the UDM-UNVR and USW-Pro 24 communicate over a Fiber cable. I also took an old broken hard drive and bent all the pins on its back and just put that in the UDM-Pro hard drive bay, so if anyone does get in they will get a hard drive that years ago was fried by a nearby lightning strike on a very old NightOwl NVR. Great Video
Alternatively, block their network access to everything but the NVR. It's sad to have to do this and limits how you can wire your network. But still, better than having a botnet in your home
Was always told you should pull in cold air from the front and push out hot air from the back of the case whilst pumping cold air in the bottom and pulling hot air out the top of the rack, that way you're not killing your hard drives with heat or cooking yourself when you're working at the front on the node
Yeah, typically only some routers and networking equipment is configured to exhaust out the front, as they are sometimes installed in the back of a rack. Though for small-business-focused rackmount enclosures, it's the wild west. Many small switches have side-mount fans (though I often see them used for exhaust, rather than intake!). Definitely need to watch thermals on this box.
@@JeffGeerling the other thing I see a lot is people running racks without a front or back and then wondering why the cooling isn't working. Need that tight air stream just like super cars doo to hold them to the ground
This video was exactly what I’ve been looking for! Thank you very much. Please make more detailed in depth videos of this! Maybe a playlist! Maybe how to use your old notebook and turn it into an Linux NVR, and stream it to either an personal app, home assistant , and run Python scripts for automation Oh man this is sooo cool
It is almost as if Jeff’s a mind reader. I added this to my todo list just recently for the homelab and Jeff’s got me covered. Although I wonder if Scrypted perhaps could be a better fit in a pi 5 setup.
I enjoyed this video because my mother's home has one of those Hikvision NVR systems. I replaced one of the cameras because it was stuck in night mode, so now I have a camera to play with.
Been using Frigate to watch my home since last summer. Overall I really like it. It's simple (as long as you know a bit of yaml) and integrates well with Home Assistant. My main issue is that it keeps thinking a big rock in my yard is a person, but I might be able to work around that with some settings tweaks if I can find the time. I just have way too many projects...
"Everything is being taken over by AI, and not everything about that is hype." Thank you Jeff, working with AI on areas it is supposed to be of good use. This looks like a great project.
If mdadm detects that the raid array is foreign and not local, it will start numbering it from 127. The way that it detects this is by looking at the hostname recorded during array creating and comparing that with the system hostname. This might be happening early in the bootup sequence where the static hostname from /etc/hostname isn't available yet.
I really like Frigate, been running it for about half a year on a 12600K with QSV and a M.2 Coral TPU. Only issue is that I seem to experience some sort of memory leak, possibly related to go2rtc that I couldn't solve yet. But Debian seems to cap it at about 15,5 GB, so about half a GB below maximum memory capacity so I'll live with that.
Hey Jeff, just some tips for your set up. 1. You could try moving your secrets into a .env file and reference them in your .yaml config instead of having them raw. This allows you to publish your setup and save it somewhere publicly without worrying. 2. I think there is more robust way to reference your drives by going to dev -> disk -> by UUID, which makes your drives referenced by their hardware identifier. It would suck to have your set up fail on reboot!
Fun project :) I wonder you mabey can do a video on a old DVR/Setupbox/DVD player with a RPI and a bunch of drives in it original case and with the old remote and build the ultimate home theater box.
Jeff I see a lot of people using the TPU , but not really utilizing it for anything much, other than to see squares around people on the screen. Maybe you could show us how this TPU could be used on a CCTV to highlight specific events, like people littering, setting of fireworks, or hurdling objects towards to CCTV camera, when there loud noises beyond the usual. This would be a great episode on how to put these TPUs to work
Maybe I missed it in this video or I’m going insane but you had mentioned a while back ago there was an alternative to a coraltpu I have the usb one and it’s been running fine but I wanted to try another one and I remember you mentioned one brand do you remember what it was? I remember looking at it too but was harder to get at the time
I've not been very successful with DIY NVRs and generic Cameras for many years. I've been almost successful with Milestone XProtect Express+ (not open source, but free version up to 8 cams) and RTSP-enabled cameras. But my wi-fi cameras (various brands) had terrible connection reliability. In my new home, I went full Unifi and never looked back. I love the alternatives that Jeff presented here. For DIY NVR project, that may or may not work as intended (in my case, with my old cameras, it probably wouldn't) this doesn't seem like a cheap alternative, but it's very interesting nonetheless.
Unifi is a great option, especially if you're in that ecosystem. Most things 'just work' and they have good quality (for usually a little higher price, but that's what you pay for!). WiFi is always a bit of a problem with cameras, I have had a lot of little issues with Ring, SimpliSafe, and Nest cams over WiFi, so I've replaced all but a few now with PoE wired cams, which are like 99.999% reliable compared to maybe 98% on the WiFi cameras (they always seem to fail when you actually need them, too...).
for good measure, since you didn’t buy those cameras and open them new, you really should if you haven’t already, download the official latest firmware and refresh those cameras. You never know these days if anyone did anything nefarious or even just potentially updated them an unofficial firmware that’s compromised. Great video. Keep up the great content
A good point! I have a blog post showing how I reset and upgraded each of the four cameras that came with the place. Though even with the latest firmware (from 2018, on these older camera models), I'm nervous about letting the cameras run wild, so they're getting their own separate VLAN.
That md0 being renamed to md127 always gets me when making a new RAID. I keep forgetting that is a thing. On my home I use Motion to record clips that are sent by email when I am not at home. The originals are stored encrypted in a cloud service. I use a RPi3b but it struggles to produce anything above 720p10fps. Will replace it with a PC in the future (that will also run other stuff like Nextcloud). Never received an email so far :)
This would be an excellent solution for my box of 4 Hickvision cameras (I think that mine are the same model as yours actually) that I got from my Grandfather-in-Law a couple of years ago. I was going to use an old Optiplex 755 SFF that I have, but this seems like it would be more power/space efficient.
Thanks for doing this video. I have a Reolink system. (Blocked from the internet) and a bunch of other cameras it wont talk to. This set up looks like it would work for the spare cameras. I would love to set them up as wildlife cameras for our garden. Frigates UI looks almost the same as the web version of the Reolink one.
Thanks for this! I actually cobbled together my first NVR today with a liberated Wyze Cam V3 (basically got root on it, patched the cloud stuff out, and mounted a NFS drive on my NAS at the location the camera stores its recording)! Janky, but it works for now. Frigate looks to have everything I hoped I could do, so I'll probably source a third raspberry pi (one is a CUPS server, the orher is running docker containers like home assistant) and a NPU, and look for better cameras since the Wyze isn't really good.
I got excited because I thought for a second you had a very similar network switch to me (The HP Aruba 2930 you showed for like 3 seconds). Struggling massively with getting trunk ports to play nice on that thing with Proxmox...
Yes! I believe someone else has shown a configuration for that on GitHub, the ideal is if your camera puts out the right feeds you can consume for each task. however I have only recorded and saved events as the full res.
Here's a tip for future videos, by default CC is always on the bottom of the screen and obfuscates commands being shown in the shells. So you might want to avoid using the very bottom of the screen when showing text commands.
Hi Jeff. Linux Mounting Tip: chattr +i /mnt/whatever And then mount the device. After that it is impossible to write to /mnt/whatever, until the device is mounted. I use that for all additional mounted devices.
RPI was showcasing their AI cam at Embedded world. its looking like itll cost around $90. You can even plug that directly in to the small PI Zero. Imagine whats coming around the corner.
Very neat possibilities of deploying an 'edge camera' network, where the cameras themselves are configured to do detection and send only relevant clips. It would make things like WiFi more feasible for some use cases!
@@JeffGeerling Some very cool "edge camera" network related fun inbound no doubt. I was very impressed with what was on display at the show. Theres a nice m.2 2230/2242 hat inbound as well which looks pretty cool. I also had a look at some of the Pi products being pushed by Kontron in the industrial space. Impressive what is being produced on this platform now.
In data centers, rack equipment always exhausts to the rear. Cool aisle/zone vs hot aisle/zone. I prefer Zoneminder over all of these stated NVR packages and it too integrates with Home Assistant. Frigate seems a bit feature restricted. The Hikvision exposes the image rotate via it's web interface so I'd expect Frigate to be able to do at least that. I'd also expect Frigate to expose PTZ controls for compatible cameras. My 2nd least inexpensive camera is a Sonoff (yes, I know - no need to criticize - it was an experiment). It too only allowed PTZ through it's own app until I updated the firmware to support ONVIF. (Don't ask what my least expensive camera is. It's an extreme case backup at best)
Hi Jeff, Tried following your guide and got lost between Ansible, Docker and frigate. I'm a 60yr keeping the grey matter active but would like a simpler guide if there is one.
Ill have to give this a try. Im currently using a Windows based video recorder on a 24 core Epyc server. I'm moving and my new place is offgrid solar and running the server 24/7 is going to be expensive as I'll need to get more batteries.
I have been running a Pi 5 with Coral TPU at home for a few months with a couple cameras (I'll be adding a couple more over time, like one on the sky to watch weather and get timelapses!). Otherwise I've been slowly building things up in Home Assistant as well, I just haven't tied everything together yet.
@@JeffGeerling Please share a project experience like this one. Planning to start on this myself (like many others I guess), just missing good leads, you can be "the one"
Thanks Jeff! This 62 year old just started a home lab about 6 months ago. I just added an NVR to the list of things to try because of this video! I especially like the videos of you and your dad!
WOA... not what I expected when I clicked to get here from the link that said: I Spy, with my Little Pi... YES I really would like to replace my 3 hikvision NVR's. This is awesome....
Jeff: AI is taking over everything
Dalek in the background: My time to exterminate is nearly here
Daleks trying to ~EXTERMINATE~ since 1963
But...but Daleks are cyborgs, not AI. They have a chewy center...
^ Daleks are biological squids in a thicc metal suit.
Not even been all that many pure AI enemies in the modern Who-verse(?). Been a couple of robots over the years, like the clockwork robots.
Not watched all the old stuff, but google does show a few from old Who.
But the Terminators are waiting patiently......
@@Yuriel1981 Maybe that's why Zuck and Musk seem so off...
As an installer here are my questions;
A. Can you separate smart activated recording settings from smart activated detections? You may want to always record motion events but you might only want an alert with a specific line-crossing event.
B. Probably in your next videos, does it have an app?
BB. Remote viewing options on same network and via a remote location.
C. Is there a secure way to remote to the device?
D. Unifi is breaking camera barriers. The specs I like are: 2K cams (nice balance between function and recording time), Non-pigtail so the RJ45 plugs straight to the base, dimensions similar to Ø3.5 x 2.8".
E. Expansion limitations. What is a realistic number of 2K (4MP) cams for this?
F. If you could do an overall front end cost and estimate of time to setup with a guide you have.
G. Long term mgmt for keeping the system updated?
H. Is DHCP running on the PI or via the primary router? ISP changes out a router, can the system roll with it?
I hope that helps with some material for the next videos. This super interesting especially for houses and small businesses.
A lot of good questions! A few quick answers (not all):
A. I believe using Home Assistant, you can do this-I don't know if Frigate has anything built in for that kind of logic.
B. No official app, but most people use it with Home Assistant, which does have an app (I didn't cover that in this video).
BB. It has the web UI which exposes individual camera views and a 'birdseye' grid of all cameras. For remote, you'd need to set up some sort of connection like with Twingate, or Wireguard (that's how I do it).
E. For the CM4, I'd say 4-6 1080p cameras, or 2-3 4K cameras (if recording 24x7, plus motion detect + single coral). For Pi 5 (or future CM5), maybe double that, especially if you have two Corals.
F. Total cost of my system, cameras included, $1-1.5k. Install (not including running cabling) probably 1-1.5 hours, including software setup. First time will take longer as you're learning how to get Frigate set up for your cameras and your needs.
G. For updates, so far (only been 6 months in my setup) it's just swapping out a version number in Docker, or running a couple commands to upgrade the Docker container from the old stable version to the latest stable version. Since Docker uses a volume mount for data storage, and in my case, configuration files are also mounted in, as long as the upgrade doesn't require configuration syntax changes, it's quite simple.
H. DHCP on my router here-but I believe you can set things up on the Pi if you want to have it be its own little router for the cameras. I haven't done that in my setup, at least not yet.
“For Pi 5 (or future VM5), maybe double that, especially if you have two Corals.”
Are you going to try that with this unit and see if your prediction is true? I would be curious to see how much more capable the NVR becomes and if you experience any limitations with the NVR-specific hardware.
Nice setup! A recommendation I've seen for the issue at 17:25 of accidentally writing to the / partition if the HDD RAID doesn't mount is to make the mount point immutable with `chattr +i /mountpoint` (with the mount unmounted), so that any attempts to write will error if the mount is not present.
I can actually see this as good advice in general when mounting drives.
0:53 "Ignore PEP 668 because it's silly" SO TRUE, it's been such a pain to deal with and in a lot of cases it just doesn't make sense since you'd be doing it for your user and it will not touch rest of the system
Installing packages with --user will still break things. Say you have a system installed program X written in Python that depends on library Y. As your user, you install a different version of library Y with pip. This can break program X, because it will see your user's library Y in preference to the system one, and if they are not compatible, X will no longer run, and you may have no idea why and blame the distro or program.
The problem with PEP 668 is that it uses a wrong solution, not that the problem it identified isn't real. What it should have done is made pip create and run inside a virtualenv by default if externally managed is set to true. Things would just work and the user would not need to know or care about any of this.
@@SussyBaka-nx4ge that's what pipx is for, and yeah, that is a real problem. However, most of the software I use is not written in Python and does not depend on it, and those that do either don't break with all of the libraries I've installed, or in rare cases when they do (which didn't happen to me in years) would just print out offending library in the traceback for me to figure.
@@hatkidchan_ pipx is a good tool, it really should just be the default behaviour on externally managed python installations though.
Omg, just discovered the EXTERNALLY-MANAGED file! Many thanks 😊
PEP 668 is indeed very silly
This is _exactly_ what I've been wanting to do for a couple of years or more. Thanks for all of this! It will really help me up my home monitoring game, especially for my mom's house!
I really love the title to this video Jeff, it’s gold. 😮🎉
I bought a Coral on a whim during lockdown and had no idea what I wanted to do with it. I stumbled on Frigate last year and gave it a bash on my NUC. Love it!
Really interesting video on DIY devices. As a footnote having the fans being intake rather than exhaust has advantages, you get good flow out passively through holes and the case will be pressurized. This means you can put filters on the fans with only a bit of loss on flow and you'll keep dust out which is important for thermals.
Good point!
Thank you Jeff for making this, it's fantastic! In our household we absolutely love your channel! All the best!
"I'll zip tie this maybe--probably not." 🤣
Plot twist: I didn't lol
The caption also said he didn't lol
6:36
Twist tie, no plots or zips.
That's what the shiny case is for - to hide the diy mess inside. ;-)
Just bought a house in STL and a homelab has always been a goal. Finding this channel has been amazing and I am excited for my future
Welcome to St. Louis!
Love the videos... Am handicap and just found you a few months ago.. love how you do vids and love to live vicariously through you
What makes Frigate so good? The AI detection with that Coral TPU. Any NVR will do motion detection, but this takes a snapshot of the motion, feeds it to the AI chip and asks "hey, what's this?" If it's not what you're interested in (person, car, dog, cat) it doesn't record an event. It drastically reduces your false triggers and notification fatigue.
Frigate can be difficult to begin with (the documentation is ok, but sometimes disorganised), but once you understand what you're doing it's very rewarding.
The end result is nothing short of incredible. 100% worth the time investment to get it working.
...oh, and it's free.
this is literally what I've just been thinking of doing, so glad you made a video about it!
Perfect timing!
It’s pronounced hi-k-vision. Side note, they are under US sanctions for support they provide to the Chinese government in their mass surveillance in Xinjiang.
The only sanctions they're under is from government contracts or entities that receive government funding.
And the sanctions are a joke. You can go with Hikvision or Dahua and have the hard coded CCP back door in your cameras, or you can go with an NDAA compliant camera and have the NSA hard coded back door in your camera. They don't even try to hide it, you can use an EEPROM dumper to dump the camera firmware and see it all.
After the initial scare of the US Government "banning" Hikvision and Dahua, most of the supply houses dumped their products like they were cancer, but it wasn't but a year or two after that they started advertising them again, just not NDAA compliant.
HIKVision is banned in a lot of countries. Unfortunately, the company I work for has about 20 of these junk NVRs. The software is total junk. Thankfully we are slowly replacing them with Meraki cameras.
@@Hatch3dLabs While iVMS4x00 leaves a lot to be desired, it's not literal ewaste trash like Meraki.
Meraki is a dystopian nightmare of anti-consumer practices, and it's hideously expensive. Cisco nickel and dimes you to death on everything.
Vendor lock-in, requiring all sorts of licenses to do anything, no easy way to do local on-site storage.
It's also not safe at all. "oops, sorry, your payment information was misconfigured so we shut your cameras off, we don't care about that murder that just happened, toodaloo, no video for you!"
Meraki is basically the Apple of the CCTV world.
And Hikvision isn't "banned" in "a lot of countries". Many countries have placed restrictions on where Hikvision and Dahua cameras can be used, but the public are not banned from buying or selling them.
@BlackBagData is your company selling them or giving the old ones away?
@@kodedjackson we e-waste them since we are a non-profit that has to follow strict guidelines that wouldn’t allow for either.
I'm glad you're making another video for the video recording setup process, frigate has so many options
I've just added a Coral to my Frigate machine this week as well. Great little upgrade!
Did you ever run into issues with frigate picking it up?
@@anonanon4732I didn't have any issues. I've got a video showing how I configured it on my channel but I didn't do anything special.
I've been running frigate with a TPU for detection for a few years. Couple little wrinkles along the way with breaking change upgrades, but for the most part it's been pretty painless, and works great.
Tried shinobi in the past and gave up, got this setup on my home lab in about 15mins. Thanks for the recommendation!
Some people seem to love shinobi-I just couldn't get the hang of it, maybe it was just not mapping to my mental model of what a UI should be :D
Hi Jeff!! I remember thinking when this video came out “oh nice really proof of concept” but now that I’m packing my apartment to moving to a house I fell here again and this thought “that’s exactly what I need!! Hahaha thanks for sharing. Will play with frigate tomorrow with my cameras to make my version of it
Awesome and good luck! I have Frigate going at both office and home now, been working perfectly for almost a year!
I'm going to redo my office setup soon, too! (still Frigate, but with CM5 or Pi 5 and Hailo instead of Coral).
Big 👍 I am bookmarking this video. Never heard of Frigate. The video has given me enough info to repurpose a dead 16 port POE NVR.
Why is Frigate so fun to say. Frigate… frigate…. FRIGATE
this guy frigates…
I frigor 💀
yaml too
my favorite type of boat
Frickn' Frigate!
Honestly as soon as you showed the case I went "wow that is really cool" paused the video and I went right to the page to order one. 😂 Thanks a lot Jeff
Hehe sorry about the impact to your credit card statement!
Jeff, that was a great thumbnail. Your creativity on the channel does not go unnoticed.
If the fans were set as exhaust, they'd pull air mostly from nearby vent holes, which wouldn't really do much. With them as intake the airflow over the CM4 will be higher. You can see the flow disparity in the Feynman sprinkler.
Interesting... I think I might do some testing, get temperatures over a day or so, flip the fans, and do it again, to see if it makes much difference in this setup.
@JeffGeerlin probably the best way, but also account for the temperature in the house/ room you have it in to make it more reliable data
I prefer Moonfire NVR over frigate. It's open-source and has the best performance of any NVR software that I've ever used (minimal copy, no re-encode) so it runs smoothly on my PI 2
Oh neat! I was looking around for a simple low-resource-usage NVR and couldn't find any since MotionEyeOS seemed to die off, but I've now added Moonfire to my project, I'll hopefully get to testing it sometime: github.com/geerlingguy/pi-nvr/issues/13
Pi 2? It's 2024, not 1764.
Havent even watched the video yet
That an awesome title man
I have multiple Rock64 boards that I have laying around because I have no use for them.
Thanks for mentioning the Rockchip Frigate hw acceleration. Now I have a use for them.
I have briefly looked into Frigate before in the past but the quick demo sold me on it.
Currently, I was experimenting running TinyCam inside Waydroid on a headless DietPi Dell Wyse 5070 using the Cage Wayland compositor. Performance is good, but reliability is not as sometimes Waydroid would be stuck in a bootloop, for which Waydroid had to be relaunched.
Great video Jeff!
A trick I learned from The Hook Up's channel (which you touch on) is to use the camera substream for detection and 24/7 recording (if you want that) and to then trigger recording the higher quality stream on a detection event in order to improve performance and also reduce storage requirements.
I'm a little disappointed to see blue "tongues" on the usb ports in that chassis if it only supports USB 2, even if there is no "official standard" for indicating the performance of USB ports. Otherwise it looks like quite a nice rack mount solution for a custom NVR build
That's another good tip for performance, especially if you have less storage space. My 8TB should go for a good long while, but for 24x7 recording, you can survive on 1 or 2 TB with the 480p streams.
Fan intake tends to break surface tension, so can pull more heat.
The power supply may exhaust, so would tend to not contribute to case heat. So, electronics should run cooler.
Remote NVR location. If this is going to be used for security footage you may want to relocate the NVR away from the network rack as anyone (breaking in), that knows about NVR's will head straight to the rack to get the NVR/Hard Drives. In my case that was an easy project as the UDM-UNVR and USW-Pro 24 communicate over a Fiber cable. I also took an old broken hard drive and bent all the pins on its back and just put that in the UDM-Pro hard drive bay, so if anyone does get in they will get a hard drive that years ago was fried by a nearby lightning strike on a very old NightOwl NVR.
Great Video
17:34 This sounds like an endianness and/or twos-complement bug. The value 127 is the max "signed byte" value.
0b00000001 = 1
0b01111111 = 127
So glad you made this video been looking for an upgrade for my motioneye OS
I am fascinated with those little Noctua fans. Like one day, those two will grow up to be 140mm NH-D15 cpu tower cooler fans. Yay.
As long as you plant them in fertile soil and keep them warm!
You should see if those cameras can run OpenIPC would not trust the firmware on them.
Always run the cameras on a separate VLAN, don't give them Internet access! :)
Alternatively, block their network access to everything but the NVR. It's sad to have to do this and limits how you can wire your network. But still, better than having a botnet in your home
@@JeffGeerling I'd love to see a tutorial in your channel (for open IPC)
@@JeffGeerling Isolation is what the US government and 99% of installers apparently don't understand.
Was always told you should pull in cold air from the front and push out hot air from the back of the case whilst pumping cold air in the bottom and pulling hot air out the top of the rack, that way you're not killing your hard drives with heat or cooking yourself when you're working at the front on the node
Yeah, typically only some routers and networking equipment is configured to exhaust out the front, as they are sometimes installed in the back of a rack.
Though for small-business-focused rackmount enclosures, it's the wild west. Many small switches have side-mount fans (though I often see them used for exhaust, rather than intake!). Definitely need to watch thermals on this box.
@@JeffGeerling the other thing I see a lot is people running racks without a front or back and then wondering why the cooling isn't working. Need that tight air stream just like super cars doo to hold them to the ground
@@chriscjjones8182 Wait, how fast are your server fans going if the rack is lifting off the ground!? :D
@@JeffGeerling 😂😂😂 Love it
I spy with my Raspberry Pi NVR. Frig it with Frigate.
13:36 what happens if you are using a raspberry pi as a camera? and does the motion eye work on it?
This video was exactly what I’ve been looking for! Thank you very much. Please make more detailed in depth videos of this! Maybe a playlist! Maybe how to use your old notebook and turn it into an Linux NVR, and stream it to either an personal app, home assistant , and run Python scripts for automation
Oh man this is sooo cool
That PoE interceptor switch card is so cool
It is almost as if Jeff’s a mind reader. I added this to my todo list just recently for the homelab and Jeff’s got me covered. Although I wonder if Scrypted perhaps could be a better fit in a pi 5 setup.
“AI is taking over everything and not all that is hype” had me dying Jeff😂 good videos as always good sir.
Server case cooling should typically go from intake at the front to outtake at the back. Having intake fans in the side panel is very unusual.
I enjoyed this video because my mother's home has one of those Hikvision NVR systems. I replaced one of the cameras because it was stuck in night mode, so now I have a camera to play with.
That was so helpful, I was looking at buying a complete system but I like this way more.thanks
I use an old Dell 7040 micro with an M.2 Coral TPU and it handles 9 x 2k cameras perfectly, barely breaks a sweat, the Coral TPU is awesome.
Indeed; I wish Google poured some more effort into supporting it and maybe releasing a newer version!
Been using Frigate to watch my home since last summer. Overall I really like it. It's simple (as long as you know a bit of yaml) and integrates well with Home Assistant. My main issue is that it keeps thinking a big rock in my yard is a person, but I might be able to work around that with some settings tweaks if I can find the time. I just have way too many projects...
"Everything is being taken over by AI, and not everything about that is hype."
Thank you Jeff, working with AI on areas it is supposed to be of good use. This looks like a great project.
I'm so tired of AI hype, it was better when we just called it machine learning and tried doing useful things with it haha
If mdadm detects that the raid array is foreign and not local, it will start numbering it from 127. The way that it detects this is by looking at the hostname recorded during array creating and comparing that with the system hostname. This might be happening early in the bootup sequence where the static hostname from /etc/hostname isn't available yet.
Ah, good to know! Might need to adjust my setup method then.
That NVR chassis vendor feels like they are asking for a name collision waiting to happen...
1:48 They know you have every single Raspberry Pi out there, so they figured you might use their case one day for one of them.
I really like Frigate, been running it for about half a year on a 12600K with QSV and a M.2 Coral TPU. Only issue is that I seem to experience some sort of memory leak, possibly related to go2rtc that I couldn't solve yet. But Debian seems to cap it at about 15,5 GB, so about half a GB below maximum memory capacity so I'll live with that.
Thanks Jeff, another informative and timely video.
I love this cover image/ title JeffyG!
Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes
I spy STH!
@@JeffGeerling I spy JeffyG spying STH!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Oh no, it's spyception!
Awesome! I'm just getting into raspberry pi and there's so many things to do on it! So awesome! Thank you for sharing!
Hey Jeff, just some tips for your set up.
1. You could try moving your secrets into a .env file and reference them in your .yaml config instead of having them raw. This allows you to publish your setup and save it somewhere publicly without worrying.
2. I think there is more robust way to reference your drives by going to dev -> disk -> by UUID, which makes your drives referenced by their hardware identifier. It would suck to have your set up fail on reboot!
Fun project :) I wonder you mabey can do a video on a old DVR/Setupbox/DVD player with a RPI and a bunch of drives in it original case and with the old remote and build the ultimate home theater box.
Jeff I see a lot of people using the TPU , but not really utilizing it for anything much, other than to see squares around people on the screen. Maybe you could show us how this TPU could be used on a CCTV to highlight specific events, like people littering, setting of fireworks, or hurdling objects towards to CCTV camera, when there loud noises beyond the usual. This would be a great episode on how to put these TPUs to work
Maybe I missed it in this video or I’m going insane but you had mentioned a while back ago there was an alternative to a coraltpu I have the usb one and it’s been running fine but I wanted to try another one and I remember you mentioned one brand do you remember what it was? I remember looking at it too but was harder to get at the time
Hailo 8L - Raspberry Pi's new AI kit has one, and I'm going to try updating my Frigate NVR with it soon!
thanks Jeff.
I was looking for this video since a year.
I shall get on it asap
3:22 That's like the DIY RPi project slogan. "Not necessarily the simplest solution but it'll work"
Thanks. Lots of people started down a rabbit hole.
I've not been very successful with DIY NVRs and generic Cameras for many years. I've been almost successful with Milestone XProtect Express+ (not open source, but free version up to 8 cams) and RTSP-enabled cameras. But my wi-fi cameras (various brands) had terrible connection reliability.
In my new home, I went full Unifi and never looked back.
I love the alternatives that Jeff presented here. For DIY NVR project, that may or may not work as intended (in my case, with my old cameras, it probably wouldn't) this doesn't seem like a cheap alternative, but it's very interesting nonetheless.
Unifi is a great option, especially if you're in that ecosystem. Most things 'just work' and they have good quality (for usually a little higher price, but that's what you pay for!).
WiFi is always a bit of a problem with cameras, I have had a lot of little issues with Ring, SimpliSafe, and Nest cams over WiFi, so I've replaced all but a few now with PoE wired cams, which are like 99.999% reliable compared to maybe 98% on the WiFi cameras (they always seem to fail when you actually need them, too...).
for good measure, since you didn’t buy those cameras and open them new, you really should if you haven’t already, download the official latest firmware and refresh those cameras. You never know these days if anyone did anything nefarious or even just potentially updated them an unofficial firmware that’s compromised.
Great video. Keep up the great content
A good point! I have a blog post showing how I reset and upgraded each of the four cameras that came with the place. Though even with the latest firmware (from 2018, on these older camera models), I'm nervous about letting the cameras run wild, so they're getting their own separate VLAN.
That md0 being renamed to md127 always gets me when making a new RAID. I keep forgetting that is a thing.
On my home I use Motion to record clips that are sent by email when I am not at home. The originals are stored encrypted in a cloud service. I use a RPi3b but it struggles to produce anything above 720p10fps. Will replace it with a PC in the future (that will also run other stuff like Nextcloud). Never received an email so far :)
This would be an excellent solution for my box of 4 Hickvision cameras (I think that mine are the same model as yours actually) that I got from my Grandfather-in-Law a couple of years ago. I was going to use an old Optiplex 755 SFF that I have, but this seems like it would be more power/space efficient.
Dudes like the coolest UA-camr NGL
This is SO EXCITING!!
I'm geeking out so hard man haha.
The potato quality gives a nice nostalgia feel to the video. I love it lol
Ha! I didn't even record that with my old Canon GL1!
Thanks for doing this video. I have a Reolink system. (Blocked from the internet) and a bunch of other cameras it wont talk to. This set up looks like it would work for the spare cameras. I would love to set them up as wildlife cameras for our garden. Frigates UI looks almost the same as the web version of the Reolink one.
Thanks for this! I actually cobbled together my first NVR today with a liberated Wyze Cam V3 (basically got root on it, patched the cloud stuff out, and mounted a NFS drive on my NAS at the location the camera stores its recording)! Janky, but it works for now. Frigate looks to have everything I hoped I could do, so I'll probably source a third raspberry pi (one is a CUPS server, the orher is running docker containers like home assistant) and a NPU, and look for better cameras since the Wyze isn't really good.
I got excited because I thought for a second you had a very similar network switch to me (The HP Aruba 2930 you showed for like 3 seconds). Struggling massively with getting trunk ports to play nice on that thing with Proxmox...
1080p seems plenty for storing everything. Could it do the detection and general storage with 480 and ONLY store events with 1080?🤔
Yes! I believe someone else has shown a configuration for that on GitHub, the ideal is if your camera puts out the right feeds you can consume for each task. however I have only recorded and saved events as the full res.
Here's a tip for future videos, by default CC is always on the bottom of the screen and obfuscates commands being shown in the shells. So you might want to avoid using the very bottom of the screen when showing text commands.
Hi Jeff.
Linux Mounting Tip:
chattr +i /mnt/whatever
And then mount the device.
After that it is impossible to write to /mnt/whatever, until the device is mounted.
I use that for all additional mounted devices.
Freaking awesome build Jeff! WOW!
Everyone knows you never screw the case on before you turn it on.
From the title I thought this vodeo was going to be for iSpy Agent - which is also worth a look!
Finally! Pi NVR. Thanks =)
haha I think you had been asking about this, right? It's been a while since I promised this video!
@@JeffGeerling Yep. On stream. Thanks for video. And hello from Ukraine.
I spy with my little Pi a new Jeff Geerling video. 10/10 would recommend.
Great review. I'll need to cost all the hardware (for OZ) to determine if the transition is cost effective for me at this point in time. Cheers
Hey mate, hope your health is holding up okay.
Thanks for the content and all of the best!
Thanks! And yes, health is great! Best I've been in the past decade, which is so nice after having a couple pretty rough years.
Good thing that it it hopefully upgradable with a CM5 later in the future.
there may be a few quirks, but hopefully the CM5 is a drop in replacement!
Again no magic smoke, when he power on the the recorder. Great video again Jeff
I can imagine with how many devices have *not* released the magic smoke this year... some big one's gonna go poof soon!
RPI was showcasing their AI cam at Embedded world. its looking like itll cost around $90. You can even plug that directly in to the small PI Zero.
Imagine whats coming around the corner.
Very neat possibilities of deploying an 'edge camera' network, where the cameras themselves are configured to do detection and send only relevant clips. It would make things like WiFi more feasible for some use cases!
@@JeffGeerling Some very cool "edge camera" network related fun inbound no doubt. I was very impressed with what was on display at the show. Theres a nice m.2 2230/2242 hat inbound as well which looks pretty cool. I also had a look at some of the Pi products being pushed by Kontron in the industrial space. Impressive what is being produced on this platform now.
Nice the powersupply wasn’t the loud part this time around.
So different from what I'm used to with server products!
In data centers, rack equipment always exhausts to the rear. Cool aisle/zone vs hot aisle/zone.
I prefer Zoneminder over all of these stated NVR packages and it too integrates with Home Assistant.
Frigate seems a bit feature restricted. The Hikvision exposes the image rotate via it's web interface so I'd expect Frigate to be able to do at least that. I'd also expect Frigate to expose PTZ controls for compatible cameras.
My 2nd least inexpensive camera is a Sonoff (yes, I know - no need to criticize - it was an experiment). It too only allowed PTZ through it's own app until I updated the firmware to support ONVIF.
(Don't ask what my least expensive camera is. It's an extreme case backup at best)
I was having trouble getting Zoneminder going late last year, but I may give it another try.
Looking into using cameras to track distance, speed, and time.
Hi Jeff, Tried following your guide and got lost between Ansible, Docker and frigate. I'm a 60yr keeping the grey matter active but would like a simpler guide if there is one.
Ill have to give this a try. Im currently using a Windows based video recorder on a 24 core Epyc server. I'm moving and my new place is offgrid solar and running the server 24/7 is going to be expensive as I'll need to get more batteries.
Yeah, definitely a more efficient alternative, just have to account for how many cameras (and whether 4K or 1080p) you want to run.
Nice series. Looking forward to more!
I personally use my Synology NAS as a NVR and I run scrypted in Docker to get all my cameras into Apple Home (with cloud recording) and Home Assistant
feel like that extra 24 psu needed to be next tp the switch unit just what i feel like they added those nuts there for the switch psu
this very interesting! this is something i would love to try someday thanks Jeff!
Hey have you heard there is a new box86 alike caled fex 2404 or something like it? Just saw on linux experiment news
Did you ever did the same for home monitoring ? if not, Any plans to do so ?
I have been running a Pi 5 with Coral TPU at home for a few months with a couple cameras (I'll be adding a couple more over time, like one on the sky to watch weather and get timelapses!).
Otherwise I've been slowly building things up in Home Assistant as well, I just haven't tied everything together yet.
@@JeffGeerling Please share a project experience like this one. Planning to start on this myself (like many others I guess), just missing good leads, you can be "the one"
"I Spy, with my Little Pi"
I need this on your merch! here take my money!
My Reolink NVR has car/person/pet recognition, not sure how. And as you, its in it's own VLAN that doesn't have internet