An NVR, a network video recorder, used to mean a black box from the camera shop. It took the picture from every camera and kept a rolling tape, and when something happened you scrubbed backwards through hours of nothing to find it. Frigate is that box as software you install on a computer you already own, with one addition the black boxes never had: it looks at the picture and tells you what is in it. That a cat came to the bowl, when, and for how long is something Frigate knows; the old box only knew there was tape. We use it to run a cat cam. There are no configuration files on this page; those are on the config page, and the Windows install is on its own page.
In one paragraph
Frigate is open-source software (the project lives at frigate.video, the code at GitHub) that connects to ordinary network cameras over a standard called RTSP, runs an object detector on every frame that shows movement, and records. Its unit of interest is not the day; it is the event: a stretch of time during which a thing it was told to look for — a person, a car, a cat — was in the picture. You can keep a rolling few days of everything and weeks of events, and the events are what you open.
What it is not
It is not a cloud service. Nothing leaves the house unless you send it; the detector runs on your own hardware and the clips sit on your own drive. It is not a camera brand; it works with whatever camera gives you an RTSP stream, which is most of them except the ones sold with an app subscription. It is not a phone app with zero setup; there is a text file to write, and the first camera takes an evening. If what you want is a doorbell that pings your phone and you never want to see a config file, Frigate is the wrong tool.
The three ideas you need
Two streams per camera. Every decent camera sends a big picture and a small one. Frigate looks for objects in the small one (cheap) and records the big one (what you keep). Camera setup is mostly getting both streams named and wired.
A detector. The part that answers "is there a cat in this frame?" It can be the CPU, a graphics unit, or a small accelerator stick. Ours is the graphics unit built into the CPU, answering in about 12 thousandths of a second. Which detector you need is a short page.
Retention. How many days of everything, how many days of events. That decides how big a drive you need. The storage math has our numbers.
What it looks like here
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many cameras? | Eleven. Seven watch the cat (water, food, treat, court, face, bed, playroom), one spare is defined but switched off; three watch the house and are never shown to anyone. |
| What is it looking for? | Cat and person on the cat cameras. Person so the pipeline can refuse to publish a clip with someone in it. |
| How often does it look? | Twice a second per camera, at 640×360. A cat at a bowl stays long enough that more would be waste. |
| What does the looking? | The Intel graphics unit inside an ordinary desktop CPU, through a program called OpenVINO. No graphics card, no accelerator stick. About 12 ms per look; 3.29 million looks since it was set up. |
| What does it keep? | Three days of everything, twenty-one days of anything with a cat in it. About 900 GB on a 3.7 TB drive. |
| Where does it run? | A Windows 11 desktop that was already on, with a small Linux inside it. |
| What happens to an event? | Every fifteen minutes a script asks Frigate for new cat events, cuts the best few seconds into a vertical clip, and posts it as a Short. |
Who it is for
Someone with a computer that stays on, one or more cameras that speak RTSP, and a reason to care about moments rather than hours: a pet, a driveway, a bird feeder, a front door. Someone who is comfortable editing a text file and reading a log when something is wrong. It is very good software and it is not fragile, but the first time is learning, and the second time is twenty minutes.
Who it is not for: anyone who wants it working before dinner without reading anything, and anyone whose cameras only talk to their maker's cloud. Check the camera before you check Frigate; which cameras work is the short version.
Start here
If your always-on machine is a Windows PC: Frigate on Windows, then the files. If it is a Linux box or a mini PC, the official docs cover the install and everything here about cameras and config still applies. Then get one camera in, then read the full config for what a finished file looks like.