Starting to think about setting up my home camera surveillance system and what to avoid making poor decisions, so need to tap into community experience ... you guys :-)
Frigate seems like the direction to take if I want to strike a good balance between cost, integration and reliability. Hardware is a key issues. I could install HA and Frigate on my VM running on my Truenas server but I feel I'm putting all my eggs in one basket so thinking of having a dedicated machine for HA + Frigate. The Frigate website advertises this little beasts with a Coral PCIe unit. That about 300€ if I'm lucky, but I could live with that.
For camera I definitely do not want chinese-call-home/cheap stuff. The Lorytas advertised on the Frigate website seem to be difficult to get hold of (are these not chinese btw?) in Europe so was wondering what other peoples experience is. Cameras need to be comparable to these Lorytas in terms of quality and functionality (no chinese, no call home, good image quality, good relibility, weather proof)
Keen to hear whether others have tried the hardware/setup recomended on the Frigate website and whether there are people out there that have actually got even better setups.
This guy is recommending that the Frigate unit is separate from the HA unit. I'm unlikely to have more than 5 cameras installed and it feels a bit overkill to have two separate machines?
I intend to go with Reolink. The recorder can support up to 8 cameras per recorder and it publishes an RTSP stream. The only downside appears as though you need the app to set it up originally, but I don't think it requires any kind of cloud account from everything I can tell, which was my biggest requirement, but I think it is Chinese.
I -do- use the app, however, for live streaming and configuration because it's more intuitive for me. However, the app isn't necessary for these specific cameras. I can't speak for other models, though.
I was looking at the wireless models, which I assume requires the app to initialize, and then you can uninstall it. With that said, I did pull down the app just to take a look at it, and it does not appear as though it requires any sort of account setup to initialize the cameras to begin with.
Reolink has been decent, only running one camera. It is missing the type of stream I'd prefer*, but RTSP works fine.
Does Frigate prefer OVSP or something? I don't remember all the details off the top of my head.
Don't take this too seriously, but Reolink for cheap, Ubiqiti if you wanna spend is where I'd start researching.