I’m using raspberry pi zeros with motioneyeOS 😜 not the best hardware, but gets the job done on a budget

I built a box with a standard PC case and a xeon v2 wfor zoneminder, and just slapped a second hand hyper 212 evo on there

I would say go for a v4 over the v2 because the efficiency is much better. You will probably just want 1 core per camera + a few to account for OS + container overhead, so more cores + efficiency is better here

I have some crappy reolink cameras through a unmanaged POE switch, up to a managed switch (cheapo tp link gigabit) so the camera and NVR are on one VLAN. I set some firewall rules in my eouter (edgerouter x) to let me connect to the NVR but block the cameras. Not ideal, but it works.

Perhaps better would be to use a NIC and connect directly to the unmanaged switch so there’s no need to VLAN, but I’m not using this for anything crazy, and i can still get gigabit speeds to the NVR

Also using a used enterprise 6tb drive for storage. Works fine and has been going strong for a year. They’re a fraction of the cost of a new drive, and are usually pulled well before theyre ready to fail

Loving Frigate. Really straightforward and powerful. I use a couple Amcrest IP5M-T1179EB-28MM, very happy with them too.

I’ve tried motioneye, zoneminder, shinobi cctv, blue iris, and frigate NVR.

I couldn’t get motioneye to work, but I’ll blame on me being a noob (especially at the time).

Zoneminder was stable but the UI is a bit weak and it doesn’t have person detection to my knowledge. You can get around the UI by using homeassistant as a front end.

Shinobi cctv has the best UI, but I found it to be a buggy mess, person detection was difficult to implement, and it didn’t play nice with homeassistant.

Blue iris is solid, but requires a license and windows. I have the least experience with it, but it seemed decent.

Ultimately, I landed on frigate NVR and it’s my favorite so far. Its very solid/stable, has built in object/person detection with simple support for hardware acceleration, and UI is simple but passable. Personally, I use homeassistant as a front end for WAF, but the built in UI isn’t bad and shows all your person detection events. Also, compared to all the above, configuration is done through a text file. While this may seem daunting at first, the manuals are very good and it becomes copy paste after the first camera (makes backups easy too).

For hardware, frigate has recommendations on their site. A cheap PC will do the job with ideally an Intel processor for hardware acceleration. For cameras, I’ve had the best luck with amcrest. Just make sure you throw whatever cameras you get on their own restricted vlan with no internet access. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.