Local Security Camera Recording with Frigate NVR

Record your IP Security Camera footage locally with Frigate, running as a Home Assistant Add-On or on Docker.

Why pay cloud companies a monthly fee for 24/7 recording when you can do it yourself? Why should a cloud company even get access to your footage?!

More videos in this series:

Links from the video:

[Skyelightzofficial]

Its also worth noting that on the add-on page if you dont see frigate listed you need to clear your browser cache or open a new connection in a private browser tab so that it will populate. This goes for any newly installed add-ons, try this first before deeper troubleshooting. Saved me some serious headaches lol.

[MarkGhali]

Love this series! I ditched blue iris for frigate and never looked back!

[johnmalarstrom]

You are damn good to get us non experienced users to get the grip! I love your videos! Can you please make a video on how to use external storage on Frigate in docker. I have been googling alot on how to make my docker compose file written to be able to connect to a nfs share on my synology nas. Please.

[gibberingidiot]

Frigate is obviously a great product because so many of the HA youtubers I follow praise it, but I just cannot get past the hassle of installing. 2 hours of tearing my hair out and googling vague error messages or troubleshooting white space so far to get to a point that a single web page config editor should have been able to do for me within 5 minutes of loading the docker image.

I'm using Agent DVR at the moment, which has HA integration and actually has a nice if cluttered GUI install, but I wanted to see what Frigate has in addition to offer.

The answer seems to be nothing unless you have hours to spend and enjoy typing in vi - and that's not me any more I'm afraid.

[EsotericArctos]

Unifi are a good camera, but I have found them to be expensive for what they are also and the RTSP stream is not always reliable from Unifi Protect, depending on what they do in the next firmware update. If you have Unifi Protect cameras, I would just recommend by a Cloudkey Gen 2+ and use the Protect software. If you have a Google Coral TPU, that will dramatically reduce the CPU Usage on your NVR, though they are still close to impossible to buy.
Frigate is the most accurate I have used, better than Deepstack with Blue Iris and better than any onboard camera AI I ahve tested. Mine does get a false positive, but I corrected with masking as it is a shadow from a tree that gets picked up as "human" due to it's shape. Other than that, so far no false positives and also so far less missed events than other solutions.

[johntisbury]

Thanks for this, very useful and will be on my to-do list.

[alexhope]

For the docker setup the permissions on the files in those volumes are important or you will have problems with playback.

[heatherryan]

I've got to Amcrest PTZ IP cameras and I'm fairly happy with them.

[mrxmry]

1:59 and those are 2 of many damn good reasons to go local.

[DanCycles]

i wish you had a video step by step using Docker for windows and frigate, because i followed your video on HA install using docker, but since im not super familiar with docker, idk how to install Frigate

[ronbrown]

Thanks for doing this. I had a really hard time setting this up before, but after following this I was finally able to get it up and running. Do you happen to know how to get audio to the cameras ? I checked on the Frigate page and I tried adding in the code, but it didn't work. I must be doing something wrong. Any ideas?

[mauricejoy]

Watching some of your other videos on NVR, which do you prefer...frigate or blue iris with deepstack and the AI helper. Sticking to docker as much as possible. I understand BI will need to run on a windows PC or VM

[Johnsmith-ucdf]

Hi thanks for the great content. Dam I’ve got those Reolink h265 too, which camera did you go with.

[stoneobscurity]

h265 works fine with frigate for recording, the issue playing back files. since only apple devices support native h265 playback. most browsers do not. windows and android do not.

[johnadams]

great video - thanks... got it up and running... but want to change the location of where records are stored...
I added this to the config:
record:
enabled: True
path: /media/CCTV/

but it won't start up saying,
cameras -> mycam -> record -> path
extra fields not permitted (type=value_error.extra)

Any ideas!? Thanks

[tkamen]

Love the concept of the series, but I'm concerned that you didn't frontload your viewers realistic expectations of how CPU taxing frigate AI detection is if you don't have an edge TPU. I imagine this will be talked about in the next video but given that finding an edge TPU is practically impossible right now it makes the AI features of frigate basically useless without serious compute power. The frigate devs even say in the beginning of the documentation that CPU detect is not recommended and only meant for testing purposes.

[ryanandrewbaker]

Nice video. I've just got Frigate (reasonably) stable on my rpi4, but it's making me want to upgrade to a faster PC since I can't get a coral anywhere.

[navarrolux]

I love the video, but is it possible to add Nest cameras? I am not able to find the RTSP URL for those.

[louisviciedo]

great video, how do you take a clip that you want to retain from HAS and copy it to another HDD?

[hfislwpa]

How did you know what the rtsp url was? Other than ofc the ip of the camera. Can't figure out that last suffix 😅