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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

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  • Emby development is dead in the water. It works, it’s stable, but it’s treading water. And because it is partially closed source and not changing much the addon development community is not as robust. If you try it and it has what you want, it works just fine. But I want an active community making new features and developing add-ons and extending what I get out of it. I did not need premium to get a similar feature set out of Jellyfin, I am an experienced self hoster so I was able to switch without missing a beat. And now I can click a button to skip and intro, or the recap for the episode I just finished watching. And I can try the very large set of add-ons that are out there.



  • As someone who owns these, I still have to charge them from time to time. My windows have some built in UV blocking and my home has an overhang. This won’t matter for OP but the cords are short enough you have to put the solar panel at the top of the window if you plan to open it at all so part of the day the overhang blocks the sun. Then it also matters where the window itself is positioned to get sun. I use a backup battery you would use to charge a cell phone and just set it on the trim over the window and then come back for it in a few days when I finally remember. But my windows aren’t 20ft in the air. It varies from window to window but it’s usually several months between charges as the solar panels do charge enough during parts of the year.

    Above is a year of battery data from my worst window and one of my better ones. It’s heavily dependent on how close to a south facing wall the windows are. And of course, how your open close routines are setup.

    Edit: These windows are in the same room on the same wall. The bad one is close to the northern corner of the house and the good one is close to the southern corner of the house. They are in my living room with our TV and open and close regularly as they shut when the TV is in use and open when it’s not.




  • For some context I have been running my own Linux servers for 20+ years, I have used Home Assistant since very early in in the development when everything was yaml configuration, and I have experience with ffmpeg command line configuration. This is not the typical experience for me with an early in development roll your own software solution.

    It may have changed now but the horrible configuration system is first and foremost what I did not like. But before I go into detail on that, I did not think the recognition features worked well enough to justify the struggle with the ever changing yaml settings. And I certainly was not impressed enough by any of it to start a subscription.

    My experience with the configuration is probably through the first year after it was released so keep that in mind. I had a lot of trouble with getting it to even recognize the feeds from my camera in order to analyze them. Through the period I used Frigate this became a regular battle. I would finally get the new yaml config sorted out, and then the config file format would change and I would have to try and figure out what settings I needed to adjust now or where to put them in order for it to just read my camera feeds. These were nothing special, just a normal rtsp feed that I could easily view from a phone or desktop app. Eventually on the 4th or 5th time the config changes broke my setup I just gave up.

    The recognition from the default models was not anywhere near useful enough for me to justify the struggle. And with no guarantee that I could keep this working with my cameras there was absolutely no way I would pay for access to a better model.

    I would say if you use it, do not use any camera other than what they recommend because if the configuration changes and you’re not using those you have to figure it out yourself.

    At the very least I would try it with one camera for a while maybe on the paid model as a trial. I wouldn’t invest heavily and assume it’s going to work or be stable.

    I know many people have a good experience with Frigate so definitely listen to other people’s takes. But it just took up far too much of my time to be seen as anything other than an annoyance.