ffmpeg tradeoffs and troubles with go2rtc vs. frigate

[natevw]

Sorry for another somewhat vague question, I think I might have to sooner or later spin up a separate Docker compose stack with a second copy of Frigate and a simpler config file just to fully debug each camera one at a time. But some of the general trouble I'm having is that for some reason the Frigate core detection and the "Cameras" thumbnails and Birdseye and all seem to work best when I pass raw rtsp: URLs to nearly all my cameras (there's one that just doesn't seem to work unless it's ffmpeg: from the get-go…).

But the tradeoff is that because most of these cameras are H.265 (and/or a variety of different audios) this means that I can only reliably use the "mjpeg" option to watch them live. On some computers I can also use the "mse" option but it's kind of hit or miss depending on if it's a Chromebook or Firefox/Linux or whatever I happen to pull it up on.

Here's where it starts to get hard to chase down! If I leave a camera in the go2rtc with the raw feed and try to add ffmpeg:

mycam:
- rtsp:https://some-cam.lan:554/stream0
- ffmpeg:mycam#video=h264#audio=opus#hardware

it tends to start ~crashing (breaking somehow, anyway…) apparently at the go2rtc level (all the JSON info just becomes null as soon as anything tries to connect). Like go2rtc really hates to connect ffmpeg to a named feed [unless that feed was ffmpeg: to start with]?

But if I switch the camera to ffmpeg right away:

mycam:
- ffmpeg:rtsp:https://some-cam.lan:554/stream0
- ffmpeg:mycam#video=h264#audio=opus#hardware

that seems to go better on the go2rtc side, but makes Frigate really unreliable. The ffmpeg streams seem to take forever to load. Sometimes that's an exaggerated "forever", and really I just have to wait a couple minutes (but still super annoying when restarting all the time to edit config!). But other times it seems to be an actual "forever" in that Frigate just stays disconnected indefinitely — until I click the camera feed and view it through its seems maybe any of mjpeg/webrc/mse and then finally the main parts of Frigate wake up and finally stop showing that camera with a broken "No frames have been received". (So essentially if the server reboots for any reason the camera will be offline for hours if not days, unless and until I manually intervene.)

Again, I realize there's a ton of variables here, but just wondering if any of this sounds familiar or expected? I'd like for both of these to be true simultaneously:

1. can negotiate suitable re-encodings for the mse/webrtc options so that I can watch any camera live from any halfway-modern browser
2. but also that Frigate reliably always gets frames from all the cameras after a restart, ideally very soon after startup but some reasonable definition of "eventually" would probably be acceptable

What I don't really get is — Frigate itself uses ffmpeg to read and record the feeds, right? So why would it make such a difference, both good and bad, where ffmpeg first gets configured into the mix?

[NickM-27]

What version of frigate are you running, if it's 0.12 then you might just want to update go2rtc.

[natevw]

I was runnning 0.12 but problems persisted even after I manually installed go2rtc v1.8.2:

- name: Custom go2rtc with more recent updates
    # see https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/advanced#custom-go2rtc-version
    ansible.builtin.get_url:
        url: "{{ go2rtc_dl_url }}"
        dest: /srv/frigate/config/go2rtc
        mode: 0766

Now with Frigate 0.13.0-beta5 I guess it's probably using that same "override" although iiuc it's the same version that's now bundled with the image either way? The problem with the cameras just never loading (i.e. remaining on "No frames have been received") actually seems to have been introduced by upgrading one or the other… but I've been doing tons of tweaking and adding new cameras and such so it's been fairly unscientific so far. Sounds like I might have to just start eliminating variables until I can ask some more specific questions about each of the specific things I've been bumping up against.

[Cold-Lemonade]

@natevw Are you still experiencing this problem? I am experiencing something very similar on 4 Anpviz cameras. Frigate stops recording their video feeds periodically because the ffmpeg stops.