I’ve now managed to get the stream of my HiWatch Series, model HWI- T641H-Z 2.8-12 mm by accessing via browser to rtsp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@192.168.30.50:554/Streaming/Channels/101. Working nice. But on its own, very unusful unless I get storage and image detection going. So, I need something like Frigate.
I believe the Frigate docs suggest running in a docker container installed on a VM. Very convienient as I have Proxmox (installed on a optiples 7070 micropc with 32MB ram) running a VM on which i have a few containers. The idea is to mount a “frigate” dataset created on my Truenas server on Proxmox which is then mounted to the VM. Lots of layers but hoping it should be ok.
I heard that the Google Coral TPU is not sold anymore. Is this going to be a problem for Frigate image recognition? Are there alternatives to the Coral TPU?
I have the same setup. Run ov on the igpu, works great.
You can still get the Google Coral (both the USB dongle and M.2/PCIe versions), but Google has effectively abandoned the official drivers. You’ll need to use community-maintained DKMS drivers if you go with the PCIe version on newer Linux kernels.
If you want a modern alternative, look into the Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L M.2 AI accelerators. They plug right into an open M.2 slot and natively integrate into recent versions of Frigate. Keep in mind that these accelerators ONLY process object detection inference - they do not handle video decoding.
For video decoding, your OptiPlex 7070’s Intel CPU has Quick Sync Video (QSV). You can pass
/dev/drithrough to your container, and Intel iGPU hardware acceleration will handle decoding the RTSP streams with minimal CPU overhead.If you prefer an all-in-one approach, an Intel or Nvidia GPU can handle both video decoding and object detection (via OpenVINO or TensorRT), but a Micro PC limits your physical expansion options.
Storing recordings on a TrueNAS share over NFS or SMB works just fine. Mount the NFS share directly in Proxmox or the VM host, then pass the directory through to your Docker container.
In my experience frigate is quite CPU intensive. I have 10 cameras and my old I7-8700 would die trying to have frigate process them all.
I opted for a different approach with LazyNVR (https://codeberg.org/LazyNVR/lazynvr-sources) leveraging the capability of the camera to perform motion detection and video recording directly. This offloaded my CPU and now I can record all 10 cameras on a OPi3.


