What's the trick to get amcrest 410 doorbell into Frigate?

i know this is the syntax to get the doorbell 410 RTSP into VLC:
rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554
strangely when i tried the same thing in Frigate, it does work.

  front:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554
          roles:
            - detect
            - rtmp

all i see is this green screen:

Frigate log shows:
ERROR : front: Unable to read frames from ffmpeg process.
ERROR : front: ffmpeg process is not running. exiting capture thread…
ERROR : Ffmpeg process crashed unexpectedly for front.
ERROR : The following ffmpeg logs include the last 100 lines prior to exit.
ERROR : [flv @ 0x55dd98a1eec0] Video codec hevc not compatible with flv
ERROR : Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec

ok. i got it!
went into the NVR that connects to the AD410. change encoding from h265 to h264 and now Frigate works great!

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I found a few things that helped me. I’ll post here in case they help others.

  1. need to set the amcrest ad410 doorbell’s password to something without special characters. I don’t know what special characters are not allowed in Frigate etc, but it caused errors for me in Frigate until I had a password that was just upper, lower, and digits.
  2. put doorbell camera on a static DHCP address on your network
  3. need to set the amcrest camera’s encoding to h.264. This can be done by calling up the following address in a web browser on the same network (and vlan if applicable) as the doorbell. Replace your camera’s IP. http://[YOUR CAMERA IP]/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&Encode[0].MainFormat[0].Video.Compression=H.264
  4. set up your mosquito broker service in home assistant. Add an MQTT user in the mosquito broker config. Go to mosquito broker options, and in the “customize” portion, enter the following:
logins:
  - username: [your-mosquito-user]
    password: [your-mosquito-password]
  1. After you install Frigate, make the config.yml file in the Frigate’s config directory. Include the following:
mqtt:
  host: [path to your home assistant running mqtt. just the ip. No slashes, no port #.]
  user: [your-mosquito-user]
  password: [your-mosquito-password]
cameras:
  [your-camera-name]:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://admin:[your amcrest camera password]@[your amcrest camera ip]:554
          roles:
            - detect
            - rtmp
    detect:
      width: 720
      height: 576
  1. May need to install coral drivers. I am using unraid and had to do this for Coral USB (even though it’s said only need to install the drivers if using Coral PCI device).
  2. If using Coral, need to add an entry for it in the config.yml file
detectors:
  coral:
    type: edgetpu
    device: usb

Until I had done those things I could not get Frigate up and running or the ad410 added to it.
My $0.02 as a newbie to this, my first frigate install, first time using mqtt, first time using ad410 camera.

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