How much processing power is needed for a camera server?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 6 points – 1 years ago

I was thinking of setting up a home surveilance system using Frigate, and integrating it with Home Assistant. I'd probably have somewhere on the order of 10-15 1080p 30fps cameras. I'm not sure what components I should get for the server, as I am unsure of the actual processing requirements.

EDIT 1: For some extra information, I did find that Frigate has a recommended hardware page.

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Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?

If doing CPU-based motion analysis, you could use a lower quality stream (if available from the cameras to avoid transcoding load) for motion detection, then use that to trigger recording on a higher quality stream.

This is exactly what I do. Record at 15FPS, event detection at 5FPS (at quarter resolution too).

you could use a lower quality stream (...) for motion detection, then use that to trigger recording on a higher quality stream.

Brilliant idea! Thank you for the suggestion!

If doing CPU-based motion analysis

Whyd do you specifically mention CPU-based motion analysis? Does this idea not work with the Google Coral TPU, for example?

I'm using ZoneMinder on my end with more rudimentary motion detection, hence CPU detection. (My current hardware is pre-IOMMU on the mobo, so no pci passthrough for me...)

That said, if you have hardware that can handle X (via CPU, GPU, TPU, etc), then you gotta decide how you want to spend that. Whether resources are spent more in analysis fps or evaluating higher detail frames is up to what you need.

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