IP camera & NVR runbooks for the home

Decode Frigate's 'No frames have been received' error — the RTSP path, the codec, and the go2rtc restream wiring behind it.

Cut Frigate false positives the right way — min_score vs threshold, object area, zones, and the limits of motion masks.

Pick the right self-hosted NVR for your situation — a use-case map of Frigate, Blue Iris, and Scrypted by platform, AI detection, HomeKit, and cost. Not a 'winner'.

Fix ONVIF discovery and control failures — VLAN multicast, the Profile S sunset, ONVIF accounts, and clock-skew auth.

Build a working RTSP URL — the per-vendor path families (Reolink, Hikvision, Dahua/Amcrest), password encoding, and ffprobe testing.

Fix laggy in-browser camera viewing — why RTSP/HLS is seconds behind, and how go2rtc's MSE and WebRTC give near-real-time live view (ports 1984/8554/8555).

Find why a camera drops — PoE budget, DHCP lease/IP conflicts, cable voltage drop, or a VLAN firewall change.

Put cameras on their own VLAN the right way — let the NVR reach them, block their internet and LAN access, give internet-blocked cameras local NTP, and pass RTSP/ONVIF across the boundary.

Reach your NVR and cameras from anywhere without a camera-vendor cloud — a mesh VPN (Tailscale/WireGuard) to the NVR instead of port-forwarding, and why you never expose a camera directly.

Choose a Frigate object detector in 2026 — why Coral is no longer recommended for new installs, and how Hailo and the Intel iGPU/NPU compare on inference time and camera count.

Choose a PoE camera on protocol-verifiable criteria — standard RTSP, ONVIF Profile T, a usable substream, PoE class within your switch budget, and local recording — not a fake per-model matrix.