I've had an Amcrest wifi camera for a while. Initially I was just using the Amcrest app. Privacy concerns as well as storage got me to start looking at NVRs.
Frigate was near the top of the list of open source and linux based options. I tried it but abandoned it because it had a bit of a steep learning curve and needed some type of GPU/TPU accelerator to do object detection.
I tried using an Nvidia Jetson Nano for the gpu, but ignored it for too long and it seemed to have fried itself or suffered some sort of hardware failure.
A while later I tried Synology's NVR but it was lacking features and I didn't like the per device licensing model.
So I took another look at frigate. This time around I got it working fairly easily. The documentation and community are good and seem to be getting better. Grabbing from examples and making some educated guesses worked out well. I also setup an old desktop to use as a kubernetes node for it. I'll probably move my Home Assistant over to it at some point as well.
I was able to block the camera's internet access. Frigate is only available internally or over Nebula mesh. So much more secure and privacy-focused than I started out.
I have a Coral usb for the object detection and it seems to work well.
So this project had kind of a long runway to get going, but turned out to be pretty neat.