So need a HW decoder for the H264 streams coming from my IP cameras. I have an old Nvidia GTX 660Ti I put in the server and installed the drivers and selected the older release of the drivers which actually support the 660Ti. According to this Wikipedia article the 660Ti should have support for H264 HW decoding. Now on passing the GPU through to my frigate container I didn't get the HW acceleration to work. Before I start spending hours on this, is there any tips or any obvious reason I should avoid going down this rabbit hole trying to get it to work? Anyone have frigate working with old GPUs?

 

(NB: I'm not planning to use this for AI workloads with Cuda, I already know the Cuda version that support the 660Ti is too old for frigate)

So, i went a bit further down the rabbit hole here and I thought I would answer my own question if anyone else has a question like this in the future.

 

I gave up on the Nvidia GTX 660Ti as i realized my IP cameras uses H265 and the GTX 660Ti does not support that anyway. I set up a frigate docker on a Raspberry Pi 5 just test using the HW decoders on the Pi 5. It worked fine, with object detection offloaded to my unraid server using a CodeProject.AI server and a Coral TPU. I used sub streams for detection and preview and then recorded the full 4K clips from the cameras directly to a SMB share on my unraid server. The whole setup works decently, but I think the Pi 5 is a bit underpowered for this. The recordings i got where full 4K but was laggy/choppy compared to the videos recorded locally on the IP Cameras. (might be networking related and not underpowered Pi)

 

I finally decided to invest in a more modern GPU for my unraid server and bought an RTX 3050. Hopefully this will allow me to get good results with everything hosted on my unraid server.

Edited May 10, 20242 yr by MrCravon