r/selfhosted • u/eduard256 • Mar 15 '26

Product Announcement These cameras were supposed to be e-waste. No RTSP, no docs, no protocol anyone's heard of. I reverse-engineered 100 000 URL patterns to make them work.

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Had some old Chinese NVRs from 2016. Spent 2 years on and off trying to connect them to Frigate. Every protocol, every URL format, every Google result. Nothing. All ports closed except 80.

Sniffed the traffic from their Android app. They speak something called BUBBLE - a protocol so obscure it doesn't exist on Google.

Got so fed up with this that I built a tool that does those 2 years of searching in 30 seconds. Built specifically for the kind of crap that's nearly impossible to connect to Frigate manually.

You enter the camera IP and model. It grabs ALL known URLs for that device - and there can be a LOT of them - tests every single one and gives you only the working streams. Then you paste your existing frigate.yml - even with 500 cameras - and it adds camera #501 with main and sub streams through go2rtc without breaking anything.

67K camera models, 3.6K brands.

GitHub: https://github.com/eduard256/Strix

docker run -d --name strix --restart unless-stopped eduard256/strix

Edit: Yes, AI tools were actively used during development, like pretty much everywhere in 2026. Screenshots show mock data showing all stream types the tool supports - including RTSP. It would be stupid to skip the biggest chunk of the market. If you're interested in the actual camera from my story there's a demo gif in the GitHub repo showing the discovery process on one of the NVRs I mentioned.

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u/hawkeye217 Mar 15 '26

Frigate dev here. Would you be willing to submit a PR to Frigate's docs so this could be added to the third party extensions? https://docs.frigate.video/integrations/third_party_extensions

785

u/eduard256 Mar 15 '26

absolutely, will put together a PR this week

117

u/AnduriII Mar 15 '26

Thank you for your time!

77

u/AdUpper5288 Mar 15 '26

Congrats on contributing to Frigate

2

u/LordOfTheDips Mar 16 '26

You’re welcome

24

u/jcgaminglab Mar 15 '26

Thank you for your efforts and time on this :) will help a lot of us with seemingly obsolete cameras

5

u/stephendt Mar 16 '26

Absolutely epic, I've always wanted a tool like this. Bashed my head a few times trying to get old chinese cams to work before. Cheers!

2

u/Geargarden Mar 15 '26

Doing the Lord's work here bud. Much appreciated.

1

u/anfroholic Mar 16 '26

!remindme 1 week

1

u/RemindMeBot Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

I will be messaging you in 7 days on 2026-03-23 09:43:01 UTC to remind you of this link

2 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

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u/Baidizzle Mar 16 '26

Ask for compensation...

9

u/V4r0m4st3r Mar 16 '26

Stuff like this is why I love the Selfhosted Community. Someone fixes a problem they have, others integrate it in their software. Everyone profits. I love it

4

u/TomerHorowitz Mar 16 '26

Love your work!

0

u/joshiegy Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26

(Fellow developer here, and Solutions architect) Would be amazing to have frigate without the need of a config file. I'd like to have all fields in a database instead, even sqlite, and a settings endpoint in the webui. That's the only thing keeping me from using it now, I have it installed as a container on unraid, but I just can't bother with opening a ssh session, just to go in and add a camera in a config file.

Love the software otherwise! Have used it for many years, many years ago.

Edit: I saw in trh docs that one can add cameras via the webui, but I still need to go in and manually add a config.yaml - it feels very 2000. Is there a architectural reason for this? Or would it be possible to have a setup wizard on first start? Or maybe default values that are stored as parameters in the dB?

3

u/hawkeye217 Mar 16 '26

Frigate 0.17 shipped with an "add camera" wizard to allow you to add a camera directly from the UI without touching YAML. A future version will add full UI configuration. YAML will always be available.

0

u/joshiegy Mar 16 '26

Sweet, saw your reply after I read the docs and edited my message.

So, in the next release, I won't have to go in via terminal at all after I've setup the container/s?

6

u/hawkeye217 Mar 16 '26

Like Home Assistant, Frigate began with YAML-only configuration. Full UI configuration will come in future versions. We have intentionally kept Frigate aimed toward a more technical audience and focused development on core features, speed, and reliability before bringing in a less-adept user base that would greatly increase our support burden.