You’re just moving all the transcoding from the GPU to the CPU. If you can get Quick Sync working, and you use h264, that’s fine. If not, you’re eating into your CPU.

You can passthru the GPU hardware to a qemu VM on proxmox. Proxmox itself will not get in your way, because proxmox is just an administative helper for qemu there. The setup for this passthru is a qemu thing.

I don't know if the same kind of passthru is possible to a docker container.

It should be fine. You can pass the hardware devices like GPU directly to the VM.

Looks like I have two options for Proxmox + Frigate:

a) full VM via a QEMU VM that then has Frigate as app container (Frigate website is not recommending this approach from what I understand)

b) Virtual environment (VE) thgrough the "Proxmox Container Toolkit" where Frigate is as a system container (i.e. docker container directly in the Proxmox environment, which eliminates the VM overhead. See here: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_pct

Looks like someone has got it up and running in the PCT environment https://www.homeautomationguy.io/blog/running-frigate-on-proxmox

Also, I need to get my hands on a Micro desktop with a PCIe slot so that I can stick the Coral unit in it. Any thoughts for cheap solutions on eBay?