Skip to content

Cameras (Frigate)

Local camera NVR with live views, recordings, and on-device object detection. · https://cam.fmm.house

What it's for

Frigate is the home's camera recorder (NVR). It shows live views of every camera, keeps recordings, and — this is the good part — runs local AI object detection to flag when a person, car, animal, or package actually appears, so you're not scrubbing hours of empty footage. All detection and storage happen on hardware at home: there is no cloud, no subscription, and no video leaving the network. Handy for anyone in the household who wants to check "who was at the door" or "did the delivery come."

Getting in

  • Open: https://cam.fmm.house — on the home Wi-Fi/LAN, or from anywhere with Tailscale connected.
  • Sign in: Frigate has its own login. Ask the admin for credentials if the page asks for them.

How to use it

Live view

The main screen shows all cameras at once. Click a single camera to enlarge it and get a smoother, higher-quality stream. This is the "what's happening right now" view.

Review events and recordings

The Review / Events section lists things Frigate flagged — each with a timestamp, a thumbnail, and the camera it came from. Click one to watch just that clip. Because detection is object-based, an "event" is a real person or car, not a shadow or a passing cloud.

Filter by object and zone

Narrow the list to what you care about: filter by object type (person, car, dog…), by camera, or by zone — zones are regions the admin drew, like "driveway" or "front porch," so you can ask "show me people in the driveway."

Timeline and scrubbing

Open the History / timeline view to scrub through continuous footage. Drag along the timeline to jump to a moment; detected events are marked on the bar so you can hop straight to the interesting bits instead of watching in real time.

It's in Home Assistant too

Frigate surfaces inside Home Assistant — live camera cards on your dashboards, plus sensors and notifications when something is detected (e.g. a push when a person is spotted at the front door). You often won't need to open Frigate directly for day-to-day alerts.

Tips

Note

Everything is local. No footage is uploaded anywhere, and the cameras are reachable only over the LAN or Tailscale — which also means you need one of those connections to view them.

  • Filtering by object + zone together ("person in driveway") is the fastest way to find a specific event in a busy list.
  • Recordings are kept for a limited retention window before they roll off — save or download an important clip rather than assuming it'll be there next month.