Recording the Camera

Recording the Camera

The feeder's camera can be recorded by an NVR such as Frigate, go2rtc or Scrypted, the same way an ordinary security camera would be. The integration does the hard part and turns the feeder into a normal camera stream that any recorder can read.

The full guide, with two complete Frigate configurations you can copy, real processor measurements, and the mistakes that catch people out, lives in the repository:

docs/nvr.md

The short version

1. Set camera streaming to "Always on." Under Settings, then Devices & Services, then Philips Pet Series, then Configure. A recorder needs the stream to be there all day, and the default on-demand mode releases it when nobody is watching.

2. Turn on "Preload camera stream" in Frigate, on the camera's settings page. Without it, Frigate waits for the connection to be built from scratch and usually gives up before it is ready.

3. Use this address, with your own values filled in:

rtsp://<your-home-assistant-ip>:8560/philips-pet-<device-id>

The mistake nearly everyone makes

Do not use 127.0.0.1:8560. That means "this machine", and when Frigate reads it, it looks inside itself rather than inside Home Assistant, finds nothing, and reports connection refused.

This is true even when Frigate is a Home Assistant add-on. The add-on is not Home Assistant itself.

You also never use the feeder's own IP address. The feeder does not serve video directly, everything goes through Home Assistant.

Two things worth knowing before you start

Recording without converting the video is almost free. About 0.03 of a processor core. Converting it costs close to a whole core, per camera, all the time. If you only want recordings, do not convert. Frigate stores the original perfectly well.

The picture is tall, not wide. It is 1080 by 1920. If you switch on object detection you have to tell Frigate that, with the height larger than the width, or the detection stream will simply never work.

Both points, plus the measurements behind them, are in docs/nvr.md.

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