Press kit
Everything needed to write about ViewPane, in one place.
Last updated: 2026-09-10 · Press contact: ken@campbellsoftstudios.com
At a glance
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One-liner
Frigate, on your phone. No cloud. Native H.265.
Two-sentence
ViewPane is the companion app for Frigate NVR — on iOS today, Android coming. Built for self-hosted users who already run their own stack, want it on their phone, and refuse to hand camera feeds to a vendor cloud to make it work.
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ViewPane is a self-hosted-first Frigate NVR companion app, available on iOS with Android to follow. It connects directly to a user's own Frigate server — over LAN or Tailscale — with no vendor cloud, no telemetry, and no account to create. The app decodes H.265 in hardware on both platforms, supports a multi-camera grid, event browsing with detection metadata, and Pro-tier features including MQTT push notifications via a self-hosted relay, full event history, and Live Wall (auto-polling multi-camera grid). Pricing is $9.99/year for Pro; the free tier is a real product, not a teaser.
Logo & icon
The ViewPane brand mark is a deep-indigo camera-lens icon with a coral lens highlight. It is used everywhere the app appears — the home-screen icon, the marketing-site favicon, the in-app About screen.
Brand colors
The palette is locked. Indigo, cream, coral, and a single saturated red reserved for live-and-recording indicators ("● LIVE" badges, recording indicators). No other color enters the vocabulary.
Screenshots
Captured on a Pixel 9 Pro against a real Frigate install. Camera feeds and thumbnails are blurred for the household's privacy; the app UI is untouched. Click any shot for the full-resolution WebP (960px wide).
Fact sheet
- What it is: A self-hosted-first companion app for Frigate NVR — the open-source object-detection layer most home-lab users already run.
- What it isn't: A SaaS, a cloud service, an NVR replacement, or a competitor to Frigate. ViewPane is a viewer. The recording, detection, and storage all happen on the user's hardware.
- Architecture: Thin client. The app talks directly to a user's Frigate server over LAN, Tailscale, WireGuard, or any other network path the user maintains. Optional self-hosted MQTT push relay enables Pro-tier notifications without a vendor cloud.
- Privacy posture: Zero analytics, zero telemetry, zero crash reports, zero third-party SDKs. No account creation. Server credentials stored exclusively in iOS Keychain / Android Keystore.
- Codecs: Native H.264 and H.265 / HEVC decode using each platform's hardware path (VideoToolbox on iOS, MediaCodec on Android).
- Pricing: Free tier is real (one server, multi-camera grid, fullscreen + pinch-zoom, last 20 events, LAN + Tailscale, demo mode). Pro is $9.99/year and adds MQTT push notifications, full event history with filters, multi-server, clip playback + save/share, and Live Wall.
- Source: App source is private (proprietary).
About the developer
ViewPane is built by Ken Campbell, founder of CampbellSoft Studios — a small software studio in Alabama, USA, that ships software we use ourselves every day. Other CampbellSoft projects include DockPilot (Docker / Portainer companion app) and SongStitched (custom-AI song service). The studio's pricing philosophy is documented at campbellsoftstudios.com.
Further reading
- Why we built ViewPane — the case for a Frigate companion that does H.265 right.
- Frigate threshold tuning: pull the histogram first — a real-world tuning story from the production deployment.
- Shipping ViewPane: ten cameras, zero new attack surface — the network-hardening story behind the live install.
- Documentation · Pricing · Features
Press contact
Direct line for journalists, podcasters, and reviewers:
ken@campbellsoftstudios.com
Response within one business day for press inquiries. Available for written Q&A, podcast interviews, and demos of the live deployment.