Any good, free NVR software out there?

Not free but Blue Iris is the best out there. I’ve been running it for about 8 years, great NVR software.

Linux: zoneminder. It's free. I tried it but was slow. A lot of configuring

Windows: blue iris. One time $60. Can be up and running quickly. Has a good bit of customizing options. It's worth the cost.

Blue Iris. My first system was an NVR. Love the ability to use multiple different brands of cameras with different specs. Ton of info out there on setup scenarios, etc. Ipcamtalk has a wealth of info on BI as well as other platforms.

Thanks for all the replies. Frigate w/ Coral TPU or openVino for AI looks really powerful but I’m not familiar with home assistant and docker container doesn’t really fit my use cases of using bare metal or a lvl1 VM. Still less painful than trying to turn windows into a server.
Zoneminder w/ AI plugin and phone app looks great too. We’ll see how it works with the resources I have.

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What

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I was half joking but there are at least a dozen complicated steps to turn modern windows(home/pro) into a usable server, zero of which I have done before. Linux is like 4 lines of commands which are all intuitive.
Remote Desktop might be a plus for a headless system, but I haven’t used it in that capacity.

I mean if you're going to spin up a server why in the world would you use Windows 10/11 instead of 2019/22

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home assistant and docker container doesn’t really fit my use cases of using bare metal or a lvl1 VM

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Caveat that I've never run frigate before:

Home assistant isn't particularly "hard" to set up but it can get complex and can definitely lead you down rabbot holes of home automation. Its really cool but I doubt it's necessary for you. Docker is a form of containerization which is less "levels" than a VM. You can run docker directly from whatever os your hardware is running. It's also rarely the "only" way to run software, but software is commonly packaged as a docker container because it makes deploying software easy. If you can understand running VMs you can understand docker/containers. They're not the same, but they're in the same zip code. I'd think it'd be a skill worth learning.

Blue iris (I've also never used) tends to be among the most favored of home NVR software, but it runs only on Windows. Pretty sure people have run it on Windows Desktop OS without much issue but I can't really speak to that. Milestone is Enterprise grade and I've used it in an Enterprise environment and it has plenty features. No experience in using it at home but folks do so it must be viable there. I've heard good things about frigate.

So I finally got around to playing with this and had huge success with frigate so far.
Used a nuc8i5 w iris+655 because my big machine finally broke(waiting on mobo).
Super easy deployment for anyone who has used CLi. Only tricky part of the deployment was getting the right pre trained model. Nvidia baught out the creators of super gradients and the forks aren’t without issues. This only affects those deploying Intel openVino detection.
Object detection with YOLO-NAS medium is near perfect but will miss stuff at night on old analog hikvision cameras. Yolonas small is probably almost as good, but medium runs fine on the machine, so no need to downgrade.
Detection will improve even more if I decide to do some training or get better cameras at some point.
I get push notifications only when I want them (I’m gone and people or cars are in boundary) and I can easily browse(with perfect snapshots) all other detections if I want to explore.
Next up is adding snapshots to push notifications (should be easy template) and eventually more advanced classification when I get my big compute back online.
This was supposed to be a quick replacement solution but now I want to keep adding to it because it is so powerful.
Oh and docker is awesome. Networking its containers seems less intuitive than proxmox or VMware but I’ll get the hang of it.
I really wanted to L1 VM because I figured it was low priority or maybe unstable and didn’t want it interfering with other stuff. Those concerns are gone.

Frigate, HA, nginx, letsencrypt, namecheap.
Not super simple but working beyond anything I could have imagined when I started. I’ll mess with it again if i ever get my old server/workstation up and running again. I don’t know anything about HA and just used templates. I can tell that I don’t like HA, but it’s working.
Frigate alone is great and the only remotely hard part about it was debugging the broken collab python scrypt to create openVino models. I can see some people maybe missing objects by drawing manual zones, but just go to config.yml and change 0.99s to 1s and 0.005s to 0, etc.

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What don't you like about it?

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They shill overpriced cloud services for one. Also, I never like anything until I’m used to it. Our smart home ecosystem is way too convoluted between my stuff and the wife’s to try to port it to HA so I may be done with it anyway or maybe integrate to SmartThings for another tie-in.