Moving to Frigate

[narrow widget]

Hi. I am considering to fully move from BI & Scrypted to Frigate. I would appreciate some assistance.

1. I want to have present NVR running while I set up Frigate, so I am thinking of using a spare laptop to get started with Frigate. How difficult would it be to move Frigate to the main PC afterwards?
2. Is i7-8700 with 16GB RAM enough for six 4mp cameras running AI detections?
3. If I'd get a mini PC instead, what would be the best way to add 2x 3.5" HDD to it, can you recommend a disk enclosure or good USB case?
4. Are all internal configurations, such as zone editors, done via YAML or is there a GUI?
5. I am running Home Assistant on a RPi 4, would it be better to move it to the Frigate server once I'm done?

[lone mountain]

The frigate project handles support on the github discussions page of their repo here - https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/discussions

however some thoughts for you.
a newer mini pc is probably going to be better for power efficiency and a newer intel onboard GPU be better for the video encoding side of things. as for object detection. you are likely better off using a dedicated TPU (e.g. google coral) for this. to do it with cpu/gpu you might need something with a bit more power.

you can likely run home assistant and frigate on the same system if you wanted to.
either by running them both in containers on a standard distro or you could run a hypervisor (e.g. proxmox) which would allow you to run full HAOS in a VM then you could run a dockerhost in a LXC and run it there.

as for adding a couple of drives to a mini pc. doing it by usb with standard enclosures. is probably the easiest way.

[loud ginkgo]

To move Frigate you would have to basically copy the compose file over to the new system. There is a database involved. If you don't care about keeping it, then it is relatively easy to move it. Just copy the compose and config file.

I7-8700 with 16GB RAM should be okay with six cameras. Watch your settings and you should be okay.

There is a GUI to set zones. It will copy the appropriate settings into the config file for you. There is a fair amount of YAML for other things. Frigate is not quite there for an all GUI setup.

As far as moving HA to the frigate box it depends on how you have HA setup. Some folks like to keep their Frigate instance solely on one computer. Pluses and minuses to either way you go.