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Recording

Recordings can be enabled and are stored at /media/frigate/recordings. The folder structure for the recordings is YYYY-MM-DD/HH/<camera_name>/MM.SS.mp4 in UTC time. These recordings are written directly from your camera stream without re-encoding. Each camera supports a configurable retention policy in the config. Frigate chooses the largest matching retention value between the recording retention and the event retention when determining if a recording should be removed.

New recording segments are written from the camera stream to cache, they are only moved to disk if they match the setup recording retention policy.

H265 recordings can be viewed in Chrome 108+, Edge and Safari only. All other browsers require recordings to be encoded with H264.

Common recording configurations​

Most conservative: Ensure all video is saved​

For users deploying Frigate in environments where it is important to have contiguous video stored even if there was no detectable motion, the following config will store all video for 3 days. After 3 days, only video containing motion and overlapping with events will be retained until 30 days have passed.

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 3
    mode: all
  events:
    retain:
      default: 30
      mode: motion

Reduced storage: Only saving video when motion is detected​

In order to reduce storage requirements, you can adjust your config to only retain video where motion was detected.

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 3
    mode: motion
  events:
    retain:
      default: 30
      mode: motion

Minimum: Events only​

If you only want to retain video that occurs during an event, this config will discard video unless an event is ongoing.

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 0
    mode: all
  events:
    retain:
      default: 30
      mode: motion

Will Frigate delete old recordings if my storage runs out?​

As of Frigate 0.12 if there is less than an hour left of storage, the oldest 2 hours of recordings will be deleted.

Configuring Recording Retention​

Frigate supports both continuous and event based recordings with separate retention modes and retention periods.

tip

Retention configs support decimals meaning they can be configured to retain 0.5 days, for example.

Continuous Recording​

The number of days to retain continuous recordings can be set via the following config where X is a number, by default continuous recording is disabled.

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 1 # <- number of days to keep continuous recordings

Continuous recording supports different retention modes which are described below

Event Recording​

If you only used clips in previous versions with recordings disabled, you can use the following config to get the same behavior. This is also the default behavior when recordings are enabled.

record:
  enabled: True
  events:
    retain:
      default: 10 # <- number of days to keep event recordings

This configuration will retain recording segments that overlap with events and have active tracked objects for 10 days. Because multiple events can reference the same recording segments, this avoids storing duplicate footage for overlapping events and reduces overall storage needs.

WARNING: Recordings still must be enabled in the config. If a camera has recordings disabled in the config, enabling via the methods listed above will have no effect.

What do the different retain modes mean?​

Frigate saves from the stream with the record role in 10 second segments. These options determine which recording segments are kept for continuous recording (but can also affect events).

Let's say you have Frigate configured so that your doorbell camera would retain the last 2 days of continuous recording.

  • With the all option all 48 hours of those two days would be kept and viewable.
  • With the motion option the only parts of those 48 hours would be segments that Frigate detected motion. This is the middle ground option that won't keep all 48 hours, but will likely keep all segments of interest along with the potential for some extra segments.
  • With the active_objects option the only segments that would be kept are those where there was a true positive object that was not considered stationary.

The same options are available with events. Let's consider a scenario where you drive up and park in your driveway, go inside, then come back out 4 hours later.

  • With the all option all segments for the duration of the event would be saved for the event. This event would have 4 hours of footage.
  • With the motion option all segments for the duration of the event with motion would be saved. This means any segment where a car drove by in the street, person walked by, lighting changed, etc. would be saved.
  • With the active_objects it would only keep segments where the object was active. In this case the only segments that would be saved would be the ones where the car was driving up, you going inside, you coming outside, and the car driving away. Essentially reducing the 4 hours to a minute or two of event footage.

A configuration example of the above retain modes where all motion segments are stored for 7 days and active objects are stored for 14 days would be as follows:

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 7
    mode: motion
  events:
    retain:
      default: 14
      mode: active_objects

The above configuration example can be added globally or on a per camera basis.

Object Specific Retention​

You can also set specific retention length for an object type. The below configuration example builds on from above but also specifies that recordings of dogs only need to be kept for 2 days and recordings of cars should be kept for 7 days.

record:
  enabled: True
  retain:
    days: 7
    mode: motion
  events:
    retain:
      default: 14
      mode: active_objects
      objects:
        dog: 2
        car: 7

Can I have "continuous" recordings, but only at certain times?​

Using Frigate UI, HomeAssistant, or MQTT, cameras can be automated to only record in certain situations or at certain times.

How do I export recordings?​

The export page in the Frigate WebUI allows for exporting real time clips with a designated start and stop time as well as exporting a time-lapse for a designated start and stop time. These exports can take a while so it is important to leave the file until it is no longer in progress.

Time-lapse export​

When exporting a time-lapse the default speed-up is 25x with 30 FPS. This means that every 25 seconds of (real-time) recording is condensed into 1 second of time-lapse video (always without audio) with a smoothness of 30 FPS. To configure the speed-up factor, the frame rate and further custom settings, the configuration parameter timelapse_args can be used. The below configuration example would change the time-lapse speed to 60x (for fitting 1 hour of recording into 1 minute of time-lapse) with 25 FPS:

record:
  enabled: True
  export:
    timelapse_args: "-vf setpts=PTS/60 -r 25"
tip

When using hwaccel_args globally hardware encoding is used for time lapse generation. The encoder determines its own behavior so the resulting file size may be undesirably large. To reduce the output file size the ffmpeg parameter -qp n can be utilized (where n stands for the value of the quantisation parameter). The value can be adjusted to get an acceptable tradeoff between quality and file size for the given scenario.

Syncing Recordings With Disk​

In some cases the recordings files may be deleted but Frigate will not know this has happened. Recordings sync can be enabled which will tell Frigate to check the file system and delete any db entries for files which don't exist.

record:
  sync_recordings: True
warning

The sync operation uses considerable CPU resources and in most cases is not needed, only enable when necessary.