I am a newbie to the Home Assistant. I just learned about this product. I would like to learn more, please help me understand better. I like the idea of getting my cloud devices off the cloud and bringing them to my local Wi-Fi. I just don’t understand how that would work exactly. I have so many devices currently connected, everything from a security system, security motion camera lights, garage door openers, Phillips Hue, Roku televisions, NAS, robot vacuums, cat feeder and a Playstation, plus many more. Would all of these connect to the HA? Where would the data from all these devices be stored? I don’t see how all the data from these devices being stored in the HA green 32 gig EMMC storage working? Please help explain how all of this would work? I appreciate your assistance with this matter.
If the manufacturers of the products you own provide their service in a cloud environment, there’s nothing that HA can do to change that. You’ll have to look at each one and see how service is provided. Some do provide cloud and local, some don’t.
The data from the devices themselves is likely not in HA. HA is primarily a “command and control” environment, managing control of those devices or even coordinating them… eg dim the lights when I watch a movie, etc.
While it could access DNLA media player and control player functions, but it’s not going to directly manage the data.
Investing time in reading and learning is where to start. A place to start is here:
Thank you, I will read the documentation you provided!
Get your list of devices together and then search this forum to see if there is an integration that supports the device. Read about the integration to determine if it works locally or just talks the manufactures web site. A lot of smart devices utilize zigbee, Zwave or matter, these devices could potentially be handled by an addon that supports these protocols. Addons are now called apps, so you’ll probably need to search for both addons and apps. For cameras you should really look to see if they can be integrated with Frigate NVR. If you can get your camera’s in Frigate then there is an HA integration that interfaces with Frigate.
A basic HA architecture only requires hardware like HA green to run the controller functions. I’d recommend you buy an Odroid N2+ with 4G memory and 64G EMMC for these functions. It’s the best platform when considering performance and cost and is more enough capability handle normal smart home control and logging. As you grow you HA architecture you’ll probably add in some capabilities, like Frigate and voice processing that require significantly more CPU resources. These capabilities can typically be added as a container with integrations to tie into the controller. Should you add these capabilities I’d recommend you add a more capable x86 Linux system with a GPU to run the containers.
I have an Night Owl dvr system, Night Owl doorbell (which is completely different software than the DVR) and Feit Motion camera lights. I looked on the Frigate Site. Does the Frigate software need to be installed on the DVR or on Doorbell camera itself? Does it need to be installed in the Feit cameras too? How does Frigate work with these devices? My DVR cameras are H.264 video? But again, I have no idea what I would have to do to make all of this work? The HA green says “plug and play”, but honestly It is not looking like “plug and play” to me? I looked at the Odroid N2+ with 4 G memory, it looks really good. So you are saying to get this Odroid instead of the HA green? If I did get this instead, how much more time is invested in setting up the Odroid than the HA green?
Why don’t you just take a look at HA yourself? Set up a VM on any of your computers and install HAOS on it. You can then test everything and later migrate your setup to a dedicated unit.
P. S.: You will not learn to swim while sitting in the classroom 
You will find most here very cloud-adverse. You can look here to see if your devices already have an integration.
Cloud-dependent and cloud-connected are two different things. Cloud-dependent means that if the Internet is down, your device cannot be controlled. Fortunately, these are rare.
Cloud-connected is in-between. The cloud may be necessary to make the initial connection to a Home Assistant integration. Most often to obtain an API key. After this, you no longer depend on the cloud for this device. For example, my Reolink cameras work this way. I use the Reolink app on my phone to get the API for the integration, then I can delete the app. Or use it. I can still see my cameras on my phone, but if there is no Internet the cameras still work in my home.
Everything else is completely local.
Frigate is great for integrating cameras. and there is a Frigate add-on for Home Assistant. I have nine cameras connected to Frigate, but I had to install Frigate on a separate micro PC (an Intel NUC i5) because there just wasn’t enough memory in my Home Assistant server (also an Intel NUC i3) to accommodate nine cameras.
HA-Yellow and HA-Green are OK to get started, but depending on how far down this rabbit hole you go you will quickly find the hardware limitations, including memory and storage. The same applies to the Raspberry Pi. You will get the most future-proofing by buying a used micro-pc on eBay for less than the cost of a new Raspberry Pi, and the micro-PC will outperform the Pi in every metric. My favorite is the Intel NUC.
If you want to try Home Assistant without spending a dime, @Sourcer63 has a good suggestion. If you like it and buy a micro-PC, migrating is quite simple. You just do a backup on the old and restore on the new.
To add to this one of the terms when doing searches for micro and mini-pc’s is NuC or NuC like, there should be plenty 2nd hand intel nucs out there either in barebones (you supply the ram and the storage) or premade kits, others are the newer ryzen based mini and micro-pc’s like the beelinks for example.
I currently run my instance in a virtualbox VM on a Intel NUC5i7RYH I got second hand on FB market a while back that came with ram and an SSD then I just moved it from the stock case it came in to an Akasa passive case to keep it silent.
The other option is to look for used Thin clients like the dell wyse line or the hp t series, business’s will overtime put up used machines for either bulk or individual buy if not sending to recycling centers when it comes to machines they no longer need.
Otherwise get say a hp prodesk without any monitors for second hand as a dedicated machine, I have a spare HP ProDesk 600 G3 I’m still deciding what I want to do with it since it was a freebie from a client that no longer needed it.
H.264 is the optimal choice for video encoding with Frigate. You have to determine if your camera’s make the video available via a web based protocol such as rtsp, onvif, rmtp, http, etc. If the camera’s or the DVR expose the video by one of these formats you can display them either directly in HA or via frigate. You don’t install anything on your existing DVR or camera’s, you pull the streams they make available. The only advantage with buying an HA green is that it’ll probably come with a version of HA installed on it. I’d suggest that it’s wise to know how to install the image fresh yourself. At which point the procedure for installing on a HA green and a Odroid N2+ are the same. Only difference is when the install ask what hardware you have to pick the right choice for your hardware. Odroid N2+ is a choice. I’d say there is no more time required to set one up over the other.