Fregata 0.18.0

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Built on Frigate v0.18.0

⚠️ This is the first non-beta release built on Frigate v0.18.0. It contains breaking changes you should be aware of before upgrading. Read carefully below. For those wanting to stay on the v0.17.x line a little longer, v0.17.2.6 was also released today and can be found here ⚠️

Upgrading to Fregata v0.18.0 (from the v0.17.x line)

Fregata v0.18.0 is built on Frigate v0.18.0. This is the largest upstream jump since Fregata launched: a new configuration UI, a new camera wizard, a new ffmpeg, and several breaking config changes. Most of it migrates automatically, but there are a handful of things you should know before you click install.

READ THE FRIGATE v0.18.0 RELEASE NOTES, WE WON'T DUPLICATE THEM HERE:

• Frigate v0.18.0 Release Notes
• ⚠️ Note the breaking changes in the release notes

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2. Fregata macOS-specific changes and gotchas

These are Fregata-only - they won't appear in Frigate's release notes.

⚠️ Custom go2rtc exec: / echo: / expr: streams are now blocked by default

If your config.yml has a go2rtc stream that shells out to a command: a custom ffmpeg restream, a split fisheye, a drawtext timestamp overlay, a GPU rotation pipeline, it will be removed from the generated go2rtc config and that camera will disappear from live view.

This is a security default (those sources run arbitrary commands on your Mac), and it matches upstream Frigate. A line naming the stream is written to the Frigate log, so a camera that vanishes after the upgrade has a matching explanation.

To re-enable, add this in the Fregata Menu Bar → Settings → Environment Variables, then restart Fregata:

GO2RTC_ALLOW_ARBITRARY_EXEC=true

ffmpeg is now version 8 — and both versions ship

Fregata bundles ffmpeg 8.0 (default) and 7.0 as a fallback, matching upstream Frigate. If one camera's stream hits an ffmpeg-8 regression, pin just that camera back:

cameras:
  my_camera:
    ffmpeg:
      path: "7.0"

Birdseye restreams, timelapses, and preview clips will look better and use more bandwidth

ffmpeg 7 silently capped VideoToolbox hardware encodes at about 200 kb/s when no bitrate was set. ffmpeg 8 removed that cap. Rather than restore an artificial limit that was producing visibly blocky output, Fregata now sets explicit, deliberate quality targets:

• Birdseye restream (off by default): 2 Mb/s — roughly half of ffmpeg 8's unbounded default, and a large quality improvement over 0.17.
• Timelapse exports and preview clips: constant-quality encoding that scales with the content, instead of a fixed byte target.

Net effect on a typical install: previews and timelapses look noticeably better. If you restream birdseye over a metered or constrained link, that stream's bandwidth has gone up.

You can now change Fregata's ports

Frigate 0.18 adds a networking.listen config block, and Fregata honours it end-to-end (nginx, the menu-bar app, and the update/diagnostic tooling all follow it):

networking:
  listen:
    internal: 5000   # default
    external: 8971   # default

Fregata-specific behaviour worth knowing:

• The AirPlay-conflict fallback (port 5000 → 5050) and FREGATA_EXPOSE_INTERNAL_PORT follow whichever port you configure — they aren't hardcoded to 5000 any more.
• Only the port number is honoured. If you write ip:port, the host part is discarded — Fregata's own loopback-by-default gating still decides what interface it binds to.
• Don't pick a port Fregata already uses (5001, 5002, 8082, 1984, 8554, 8555). You'll get a warning and probably a crash.

HTTPS on port 8971 is now faster

nginx has HTTP/2 enabled. If you access Fregata over 8971 (the default) and have more than a couple of cameras, Live and History views should feel noticeably quicker — the browser is no longer capped at six connections.

A new "Fregata (macOS)" section in Settings

Frigate's new Settings UI has a Fregata-specific category at the top of the
sidebar, covering the two things that only exist on a Mac:

• Adaptive transcoding: bandwidth-adaptive playback, previously YAML-only.
• Detector backend: pick Apple Neural Engine or GPU per detector, with a live readout of which one is actually in use and the current inference speed. If your detector has fallen back to CPU, this page now says so explicitly rather than leaving you to infer it from slow inference times.

Settings pages that don't apply to a Mac (Intel/AMD GPU options, Linux-specific detectors, and so on) are hidden or disabled throughout the new UI rather than offering you controls that can't work.

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3. Going back to v0.17.x (same as v0.18.0-beta3)

Your recordings and database are safe. Database migrations in 0.18 only add tables and columns, so an older Fregata reads a 0.18 database without complaining — clips just won't carry data the older version never knew about.

The config is the one-way door. A migrated 0.18 config cannot be parsed by 0.17 — masks alone will do it, and 0.17 rejects any setting it doesn't recognise.

Fregata saves your pre-migration config, named for the version you came
from:

~/Fregata/config/backup_config_0.17-0.yaml

Keep that file. To roll back:

1. Quit Fregata.
2. Restore the backup:
   • Rename backup_config_0.17-0.yaml to config.yaml
3. Install the older version and launch it.

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Getting help

PLEASE FILE ALL BUG REPORTS, QUESTIONS, OR ISSUES HERE IN THE FREGATA GITHUB, NOT THE FRIGATE GITHUB

We will triage your issue and determine if it is a Fregata bug or a Frigate bug.

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What's Changed

• Fix multiple crashes seen in telemetry crash logs
• Add additional logging around other potential crash sites
• Fix a bug that could prevent reviews that start as a detection, then are upgraded to an alert from firing a notification (also contributed to upstream Frigate)
• Fix incorrect wording on the media folder relocation wizard
• Fix FileNotFoundError race in stats_snapshot's cache-dir scan
• Improve reliability of determining where the object detector is running (ANE vs GPU), especially on M1 Macs where measuring their energy use is impossible
• Fix a macOS-specific bug that could cause gathering CPU usage stats to fail
• Filter Frigate+ model dropdown in the Frigate WebUI to only show models that can run on Mac
• Fix a bug that could cause an endless loop while trying to allow permissions for Fregata's "Smart Memory" in System Settings
• Fix an app freeze if the Media directory suddenly becomes unavailable (such as an NFS/SMB share disconnecting)
• Fix new Fregata dialog windows sometimes opening behind other apps and therefore being hard to find
• Don't force-kill a detector that recovered mid-restart (will also be fixed in Frigate Docker v0.19)
• Allow adaptive transcoding rungs to be generated even if a camera is offline at startup

Download

• Fregata 0.18.0 for macOS (Apple Silicon)

SHA-256: 1214517d747c9a55435376829c853b98c0d22542eedae7ec86cbfe013f4881ad

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later on Apple Silicon.

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This discussion was created from the release Fregata 0.18.0.