Setup ESP32 cam with Frigate

[Andreasav]

Hi

I have a esp32 cam and I can’t get it to work with (in) frigate/Home Assistant. I have tried a number of setups/settings/combinations.

I have tried both esphome and arduino setup. Both methods work in a web browser but bad/not in frigate/Home Assistant.
Sometimes I can get "live stream" with a 10-20 sec delay, if I click in to the camera, not in cameras overview.

I have frigate in docker on a Synology with high performs.

Synology DS218+, cpu 2ghz, ram 6144mb
HA latest version on NUCi3.

My RSPT camera works but not my esp32 cam.

Frigate log

Cam setup

When I have this setup, sometimes I get no frames have been received, check error logs and sometimes I get live stream, with 8 sek delay.

Frigate log

Cam setup

Another setup

Cam setup

Frigate log

How should I config my camera so I can get live stream / detection etc works in Home Assistant/in frigate?

Thank you !

[NickM-27]

This is covered in the docs https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/camera_specific#mjpeg-cameras

[NickM-27]

You shouldn't be using go2rtc external to frigate, should be using the go2rtc that is built in to frigate.

[trevorstuart24]

Is there a downside to it? My live view latency is better with the add on

[trevorstuart24]

And it didn’t seem go2rtc was even working until I added the add on

[NickM-27]

there are multiple downsides including extra connections to camera, redundant resource usage, and extra port conflicts like what you are describing.

The only reason behavior or performance would be different is if you are running the version of go2rtc included in frigate 0.12, which can be updated following the docs https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/advanced#custom-go2rtc-version

[trevorstuart24]

Thank you

[juronja]

@Andreasav

Have had similar problems. I have tried transcoding with go2rtc but to no avail. When adding streams, I have no logs nor do I see them on the go2rtc 1984 port.
But adding the input_args: preset-http-mjpeg-generic helped me to get a stream successfully. Although without go2rtc conversion the clips and recordings in HAOS sadly do not work.

Example that work for me:

[juronja]

I think I got it working with go2rtc for now. I had to "manually" add a temporary stream in the go2rtc server. Probably this is not the intended way, but at least I got it working.

Note: You can only have one active stream from the esp-cam so delete any references to the stream URL elsewhere.

So I guess in my case the culprit is the go2rtc configuration not working or I don't know how to configure it, since adding it manually works. Should the go2rtc config in the yaml automatically add the stream to the go2rtc server? If yes, I get pretty much similar errors as the OP. Maybe somebody with proper experience can elaborate.

Workaround steps:

1. Add a Temporary stream in the go2rtc UI on port frigatehost:1984. example:
   name: esp-cam-stream
   URL: ffmpeg:http://esp-cam-IP:8080#video=h264#hardware # Omit #hardware if not supported

2. Add the input path in Frigate yaml

• I have go2rtc commented out since it makes no difference.
• The path can be localhost if you use the bundled go2rtc (it's on the same host) + use the same stream name as used in step one. in my case esp-cam-stream.

- path: rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/esp-cam-stream

3. I also added input_args: preset-rtsp-restream

Not sure how this behaves if the server restarts, will prolly have to repeat step one.

any comments would be appreciated. Thank you!

[NickM-27]

adding a stream temporarily is the same as having it in the config, not sure why that would behave differently for you

[juronja]

no idea. For example, if I edit and make a "stream2" there is no stream in the go2rtc server added and I get repeating errors in Frigate logs.

[NickM-27]

this usually indicates an error in docker compose that means the go2rtc config is not being written to

[juronja]

go2rtc logs seem to be listening ok tho.

hmm, thank you for pointing that out. I used a ready made script to install a LXC inside proxmox which actually has some slight differences I noticed from a docker install (like openvino model being inside a subfolder).

indeed there is no stream2 in the go2rtc yaml

I'll investigate further tomorrow. it's been a long day. Will try to address the maker of the script.

[juronja]

Got it working today. I had to restart the LXC container in proxmox and go2rtc has added the stream and it now works. All this time I only restarted the app not the container itself.