node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket VS frigate-hass-card

It's tricky. What I did was start from the https://github.com/zachowj/node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket project, and cleared that out completely.

It's actually not that hard, there are some caveats, but there are a couple of very good examples for a dev/build environment, the homeassistent websocket module's build system was pretty easy to reuse.

Home Assistant Websocket Plugin for Node Red - Use Node Red for Home Assistant automation

Might be a bug with the NR websocket contrib. You could log an issue here and see what comes of it. Or maybe it's an HA bug.

You may want to try out the Frigate Lovelace Card

I use the Custom Frigate HASS Card as it now has nice timeline features. It makes going to specific times MUCH easier.

Personally I am using the frigate-hass-card v5 beta2 which natively supports the new go2rtc features and provides a very slick HA native front end to frigate. I don't send the streams to anything else at the moment.

However, if you choose firgate I HIGHLY suggest using latest release candidate or 0.12* version if it is out by then. It is much more stable and it can use other AI accelerators rather than coral TPU. You can use OpenVINO aka intel CPUs 6th gen and up and Nvidia GPUs. Here list of HW and expected performance. I personally picked up a cheap 6th gen i3 because of it's low TDP and option to accelerate and a low price (on ebay you can get office drone email box with i3 6th gen in as low as 70-60 EUR because businesses are upgrading to win 11 so you can get really good deals). Frigates UI is ok but it lacks camera controls (lights, IR, movement, zoom lvls, etc.), however if you will be using home assistant it has an excellent plugin that lets you pull add anything else that integrates with HA in custom buttons/controls https://github.com/dermotduffy/frigate-hass-card

Yes, the cameras do a compressed raw stream to frigate, there are home-assistant integrations directly with frigate which allow you to view live streams directly on your homepage and view historical recordings https://github.com/dermotduffy/frigate-hass-card. Frigate is responsible for the recognition (using the coral) as well as detection. I store all the recordings on my unraid NAS (both HA and frigate run on docker containers). I keep all recordings for 14 days, 90 days if there's anything detected on them. I get push notifications on my phone when a person is detected approaching the house, all through home-assistant via the mqtt integration on frigate.