Plex + Frigate? Am I stupid?

[tullnd]

Hi, my name’s tullnd and it’s been 342 days since I irresponsibly purchased enterprise gear.

I’m pondering purchasing a single machine to handle Plex and Frigate duties.

Currently Plex is on a E3-1240 v6 Windows Server box that’s mostly operating as my NAS. It’s in a big Supermicro setup. However, can’t do 4K on that and adding a GPU is gonna be a pain on many levels. No iGPU on that chip. Too many 8TB drives. I want to ride this unit out as is for storage until it dies and I replace it with something smaller and much higher density. Don’t tell me to upgrade this thing, as I don’t want my wife to leave me.

So I wanted to just get a NUC or something that can handle a few 4k streams and maybe also throw Frigate on it to drive about 8 cameras max (yes, max, I have limited options to run POE drops, so maybe more at the next house, but not for this build). Only Plex and Frigate. Home Assistant runs on a Yellow, all the Plex accompanying apps are on the Win server. Some other light stuff runs on a Ubuntu install on an old 2558 supermicro board.

I know Frigate can push a CPU, but my cameras will be at most 4MP (going for larger sensors, lower res) and often less than that. I don’t need high FPS capture for any reason.

If I’m not planning on transcoding like 3-4 streams (maybe 1 or 2 at most simultaneously, the rest are direct play), could a 11th gen or newer also handle Frigate?

I do plan to add a Coral for some basic recognition. And since no IPMI , sorry, I’m ok now. I’m gonna try a piKVM type solution </detox shakes subside>.

Frigate is super new to me and I thought it’d be more common to hear about people running both, but I don’t. I’m not sure if I’m missing something about this being a terribad idea.

[ucav117]

I run both jellyfin and frigate on a Ryzen 3600x + Coral TPU + Nvidia P4. Even with offloading detection and transcoding using the Coral and the P4 I still can see some pretty heavy spikes on the CPU. I have 3 cameras that are all 4MP. One is 1080p and the other two are 2k. I will get transient spikes of up to almost 40% CPU usage. Generally it sits at single digit usage.

I know it isn’t cheap but I like to recommend Synology Surveillance Station for security system usage. You can get their NVR with Object/facial/character recognition + 8 camera licenses for $700 and it will have way more features and way less headaches. I have installed several at different clients and once you fine tune the detection parameters it is an incredibly powerful system.

[slidermike]

If you can split the nvr and media server duties between two nucs you will be in better shape.
If not, give your design a try.
Run plex on its own nvme with the shows on spinning rust. Then run frigate on its own nvme or ssd with its own seagate purple drive. 4tb should be plenty. Get that coral to offload the work of frigate some. Use the intel igpu for plex transcoding.