Field notes
Practical Frigate tuning, alerting that respects your attention, and self-hosted cameras done right — written from a real ten-camera install.
Your recordings are fine. Your segments aren't.
A Frigate camera that looks healthy on every dashboard can still be writing hundreds of tiny recording files an hour. Here is the one-line check that finds it, why the built-in watchdog never will, and the small script that has been quietly fixing it on our server since August.
Read →The power side: sizing a UPS for an NVR and PoE cameras
Real watt math for a home camera setup. What actually needs battery, how to read a PoE budget, why the VA number on the box misleads, and how to make the recorder shut down cleanly instead of dying mid-write.
Read →Pull the cable: what still works when your internet goes out
A fifteen-minute test for any home camera setup. Unplug the router's uplink and find out, before the day it matters, which parts of your system survive and which quietly die.
Read →ViewPane is live on iOS
ViewPane, the companion app for Frigate NVR, is on the App Store today. Free to download and use; Pro is $9.99/year. Android to follow.
Read →What "off-grid" really means for a home camera setup
Off-grid isn't one switch for a home camera setup. It's four separate questions about where your data sits, and most homes only need to answer two of them.
Read →The camera that streamed on Android but not iOS
A Reolink camera played on Android but only spun on iPhone while every server check passed. The ffprobe recipe that cracked it, and a fix for both.
Read →ViewPane 1.0 for iOS: what you get
ViewPane 1.0 is out on iOS: a free download with native H.265 live viewing, zero cloud, and an optional $9.99/yr Pro tier. Android to follow (no date yet).
Read →Your phone shouldn't buzz when you take out the trash
Frigate face recognition can veto push alerts for people you've enrolled. The hold-and-veto pattern, why it must fail open, and how to enable it.
Read →Every claim on this site has a receipt
Before ViewPane ships, every feature claim is verified against the app on real hardware, and the docs are proven by running them. How that pass works.
Read →The hardware outlives the cloud
A decade of camera-vendor shutdowns turned into one architectural rule — and why every Frigate user is already living by it.
Read →Why we built ViewPane
Every Frigate companion app gets one of three things wrong: H.265 playback, cloud independence, or the price-to-feature ratio. ViewPane is the answer.
Read →Frigate threshold tuning: pull the histogram first, guess later
How a 200-false-positive-per-day garage camera got fixed in 30 minutes — and the rule that beats every threshold-tuning intuition.
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