Frigate 0.18: Looking for feedback from users on dev builds

[NickM-27]

Frigate 0.18 includes many new features, some of which require additional feedback to ensure a smooth user experience. Frigate 0.18 is still under active development and is not recommended for use in production systems (there may be large / breaking bugs).

As we start gearing up for the next beta, we are looking for any and all feedback from users on the dev builds.

If you experience any bugs with config migration, or bugs with existing 0.17 functionality then please give that feedback as well.

When providing feedback please do so in this discussion, if a new discussion must be created then use the Beta Support category not Bug

The docs are: https://docs-dev.frigate.video/

Note that docs links in the UI in dev builds point to the stable docs hostname and may lead to an outdated page or 404s. You can manually add -dev to the hostname for the correct link. For example: https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/genai/config becomes https://docs-dev.frigate.video/configuration/genai/config

We are still looking for more feedback on the following:

Exports

Frigate 0.18 brings substantial improvements to exports.

Case Management

Exports can now be organized into named cases, making it much easier to manage exports related to a single incident or investigation.

• Cases are displayed separately from individual exports in the UI and can be filtered, edited, and deleted.
• Exports can be assigned to a case at creation time (including from the single-camera and mobile review export dialogs) or moved between cases later.
• Bulk selection (similar to the Review page) supports reassigning or deleting multiple exports across cases at once, with admin-only actions properly gated.
• New cases can be created directly from any export dialog, and exports can be removed from a case without deleting them.
• Stale or interrupted in-progress exports are reaped automatically on startup.

Custom Exports

Frigate 0.18 provides a dedicated exports API that accepts arbitrary ffmpeg arguments, allowing for fully custom export pipelines (custom filters, encoders, output formats, and so on). A CPU fallback path is automatically used if hardware-accelerated encoding fails. For security, custom ffmpeg arguments are restricted for non-admin users and a number of dangerous flags (such as -filter_complex, -vf, and -attach) are blocklisted to prevent arbitrary file reads via filter sources.

In addition, exports now use Frigate's Job infrastructure end-to-end, providing more reliable progress reporting and better cleanup of interrupted jobs. Per-camera record.export.hwaccel_args settings cascade up through camera and global configuration, allowing per-camera tuning of export hardware acceleration. See the recording documentation for export configuration details.

Config UI

Frigate 0.18 introduces complete UI-based configuration management. The new Settings experience provides:

• A categorized sidebar covering every section of the config (cameras, detectors, motion, recording, review, GenAI, semantic search, face recognition, LPR, classification models, networking, authentication, and more).
• Per-field validation, inline descriptions, and links back to the documentation.
• A clear distinction between global and camera-level configuration, with the ability to override global values per camera and reset back to defaults at any time.
• Highlighting of unsaved changes, a "Save All" button that summarizes pending edits across sections, and a Reset to Default/Global button on each section.
• Indicators showing which fields require a restart to take effect, with a one-click restart prompt when a restart-required field is changed.
• Most of Frigate's configuration options can now be saved and applied dynamically without restarting, including most enrichment, motion, ONVIF, GenAI, and go2rtc stream settings.
• Manual YAML file configuration is still fully supported. Documentation pages now include "Frigate UI" tabs alongside YAML examples to show exactly where each option lives in the new Settings UI.

Please provide any feedback on the above aspects of the Settings UI. One suggested testing method would be to set up a fresh instance of dev to match your existing stable instance's configuration by exclusively using the Settings UI.

[leccelecce]

Amazing to see the Settings UI make its debut! A few thoughts from looking at this over the last few weeks:

Expandable sections

The heavy use of collapsible sections makes it quite time-consuming to see my config. For example, under Camera configuration -> Recording, to see the whole of a typical staggered retention config (3 days continuous, 7 days motion, 14 days detections, 21 days alerts) I have to expand four separate sections (Retention > Continuous retention, Retention > Motion retention, Events > Alert retention, Events > Detection retention). Particularly when the collapsible only houses a single field (as is the case for continuous and motion retention), it's an extra click to show a single integer number field.

Similarly, to find snapshot retention settings, I have to go Snapshots > Advanced Settings > Snapshot retention. Could that get lifted out of Advanced ?

** Camera configuration **

The Settings UI makes it a lot easier for novice users to set up Frigate. However, should people have to know what FFmpeg is? I would argue that menu item could be called "Inputs" or "Streams" which is more intuitive. With the new add camera wizard, it's becoming more legitimate to not expect users to understand this bit of weirdly named library infrastructure that enables Frigate under the hood.

Font color

Not specific to the Settings UI, but much more visible here given the large amounts of text under settings. For those of us that use Dark Mode - would you consider looking at the help text font color. I find the grey font on grey background is quite hard to read, particularly given the small font size.

This is OK:

This is pretty hard:

I know there is a "high contrast" theme but that goes further than I need - it's just tweaking the default to something between the current dark mode default, and high contrast.

[NickM-27]

to see the whole of a typical staggered retention config (3 days continuous, 7 days motion, 14 days detections, 21 days alerts) I have to expand four separate sections

That's a fair point, I think the general idea is to keep it separate because they should be separate structurally in Frigate. I agree though for a single field it is superfluous and we can likely just show the continuous / motion fields directly.

This might just be a side affect of how the default automatic config -> UI structures things.

FFmpeg is? I would argue that menu item could be called "Inputs" or "Streams" which is more intuitive

That is a fair callout, that likely makes more sense for the sidebar.

Font color

I'd suggest using high contrast mode in that case. Font color has a lot of ramifications to change it across the board or to break out to a separate color. We'll have to see how that would look in practice.

[hawkeye217]

I've made some changes to address this feedback in #23492

[leccelecce]

All looks great, thanks!

[xindc]

Updated to the latest dev build b3ce448-amd64 from e84a89e-amd64. Didn't change anything configuration wise. Reverted back to e84a89e-amd64 and it's working agian.

Got the following configuration error.

`Your configuration is invalid.
See the official documentation at docs.frigate.video.

Line 56: genai -> openai - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line 64: genai -> gemini - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> driveway -> motion -> mask -> str - Input should be a valid string
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> driveway -> motion -> mask -> list[str] - Input should be a valid list
Line 337: cameras -> driveway -> profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> front_porch -> motion -> mask -> str - Input should be a valid string
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> front_porch -> motion -> mask -> list[str] - Input should be a valid list
Line 471: cameras -> front_porch -> profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> garage -> motion -> mask -> str - Input should be a valid string
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> garage -> motion -> mask -> list[str] - Input should be a valid list
Line 590: cameras -> garage -> profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> backyard -> motion -> mask -> str - Input should be a valid string
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> backyard -> motion -> mask -> list[str] - Input should be a valid list
Line 716: cameras -> backyard -> profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> shed -> motion -> mask -> str - Input should be a valid string
Line Unable to determine: cameras -> shed -> motion -> mask -> list[str] - Input should be a valid list
Line 828: cameras -> shed -> profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted
Line 41: profiles - Extra inputs are not permitted`

[NickM-27]

b3ce448 is not a dev build, it is a master build.

[xindc]

oops. Didn't know that. Sorry!

[yousaf465]

links to dev builds?

[NickM-27]

https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate/pkgs/container/frigate

[leccelecce]

Next thought - it would be super helpful to create some linkage between go2rtc streams and camera ffmpeg inputs.

Lots of ways this could work, as one example could the stream names defined in go2rtc config be added to a drop down or similar in the camera ffmpeg config page? The number of times I've had a typo or other mistake here - I think it's been a fairly common error over time.

It also feels slightly disconnected currently that streams are under System - I get that that is how the config is structured, but logically, my go2rtc streams relate to specific cameras. It's not a really global setting like MQTT connections details, TLS, Auth etc...again, it arguably exposes users to implementation details that might confuse them.

[NickM-27]

In the basic case, yes, but there are numerous use cases where you may want to have a stream in go2rtc but are not using it directly in Frigate, or you need to add some streams for two way talk which is a concept entirely within go2rtc and not something in Frigate config.

I think this gets into the exact same problems we had when we initially added go2rtc, we tried making it a built in experience that "only spoke Frigate config language" and we ran into many cases where that generalization hit limits for how people actually used it and it lead to many more problems that couldn't be solved.

The camera wizard mostly demystifies this by making it a simple toggle on if you want the stream to be restreamed or not. We can likely streamline the camera side of it somewhat by having a dropdown between manual input and using a restream, just like we already have in the live section.

However I don't think removing / changing the way that go2rtc streams is a system level config makes sense.

[leccelecce]

streamline the camera side of it somewhat by having a dropdown between manual input and using a restream

This is exactly what I mean, just an easy way to see that the 127.0.01:8554/ stream you've selected actually exists in go2rtc. Just a thought!

[hawkeye217]

I've implemented this in #23496

[leccelecce]

Niche request: YAML config diff display next to Undo / Save buttons. Right now I weirdly lack the confidence in knowing what the UI is doing to my YAML...would be nice to see it. Probably just me though!

[leccelecce]

I'll probably just start git versioning my config.yml

[hawkeye217]

The "i" icon's popover next to the "You have saved changes" will show you JSON, which is basically YAML, but using git is probably your best bet here if you want to see a diff of actual YAML.

[leccelecce]

I hadn't spotted this, thanks for pointing it out - super helpful. Is there any possibility to show old as well as new value?

Also, a random test - I used the pen icon to rename a go2rtc stream on mobile, then went back to settings and checked the i icon, but it didn't show up. Went back to go2rtc streams and it was back to the original name. Is it lost if not saved immediately?

[hawkeye217]

Is there any possibility to show old as well as new value?

It's probably possible, but I'm not sure how useful that would be - just "undo" and you'll see the old value. This entire popover was just a debugging tool I used during development and later decided to keep it in the UI itself.

went back to settings and checked the i icon, but it didn't show up. Went back to go2rtc streams and it was back to the original name. Is it lost if not saved immediately?

Yes, it is lost. If you navigate away from Settings altogether, any pending changes are not preserved. Pending changes are only preserved when navigating between different settings sections.

EDIT: I re-read your message and tried the go2rtc stream rename. That specific flow (and whole pane actually) does not hook into the rest of the settings UI's pending changes system because the go2rtc section is a bespoke form without entries in the config schema. Renaming a stream is quite a rare situation as well. Let me see what makes sense to improve here.

[hawkeye217]

I've made some improvements to the save flow in this PR: #23501

[ZhaiSoul]

I think I’ve found the reason why the object classification model I reported earlier may have failed.

I currently have three object classification models, each with thousands of training images, and training them requires a huge amount of memory. If I train all these models at the same time, my system memory gets completely maxed out. After training finishes, there isn’t enough free memory left to load the trained models, so the post-training model reload operation fails.

[RutgerDiehard]

I've noticed a display anomaly with zones in the settings UI running 0.18.0-8203e39. This is how they're defined for one of my cameras in Settings -> Camera Configuration [camera name] -> Masks/Zones:

For the same camera in Snapshots:

Same camera in Review:

Capitalisation and underscores are not consistent. I do have two cameras that share zone names but this camera also shows inconsistency with capitalisation and underscores; the zones are identically named for both cameras.

[NickM-27]

this comes down to when the zones were created, zones created recently will have a friendly name set without underscores and that is what would be used. You can fix this yourself by adjusting the name, but it doesn't make sense to force the changes now since it is covered for newly created zones.

[hawkeye217]

Nick is correct, this can be fixed on your end by using friendly names for each zone. However, zone names were being transformed inconsistently across the Settings/Snapshots/Review screens (some views replaced underscores with spaces, others auto-capitalized) so I've put up a change to make everything consistent. #23513

[RutgerDiehard]

Thanks guys, I had actually created the zone names with underscores to mirror my production environment. Happy to say that 5003ab8 now fixes the zone name display anomalies.

[marcosmejias]

Hi everyone, I'm trialing 8203e39-standard-arm64 for our environment. The performance overall looks to be improved from 0.17.1. One issue I had hoped was solved is the playback page player:

• when you go from the end of one hour to the beginning of the next, there is some loading time until it loads the new chunk for the video player.

Regarding the new cases feature and the UI:

• It looks great, it's a great addition. I would say for the camera selection on multi-camera, put the camera selection off to the side so we can see more cameras at once. And also, add select all toggle as well as the ability to select groups of cameras for the export.

I still need to play around more with the new configuration UI.

---

Our current setup is the following:
Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB RAM with apple-silicon-detector
Frigate running on an Orbstack container with 106 cameras.
Recording + Snapshots mounted to NAS via NFS

[hawkeye217]

I've made some improvements to the multi export dialog that should make it easier to use for users with a larger number of cameras in this PR: #23516

[hawkeye217]

20260619_1210_marcos_frigate.tgz

I recorded the issue happening from Google Chrome. Here's the har export. Basically it hangs until I manually click around a bit ahead in the new hour.

Thanks for the HAR export, it was helpful - it seems like there is backend contention on a specific endpoint that has to do with preview frames, which may be one cause of the slow loading you're experiencing.

I've made a few changes, before I put up a PR can you test them in this custom build (based on the latest commits to dev) and grab another HAR while doing the same steps you did in your first one?

ghcr.io/hawkeye217/frigate:30e30ff-standard-arm64

[marcosmejias]

Just tried your new dev build
The multi-camera export: the new additions look awesome, it's gonna be very helpful for sure.

Regarding the hour-mark issue: it's still there, it keeps loading forever, attaching the network logs again.

20260620_30e30ff_marcos_frigate.tgz

[marcosmejias]

*.example.com {
    import tls_cert
    encode zstd gzip
    reverse_proxy http://frigate:8971 {
        transport http {
            read_timeout 0s
            write_timeout 0s
        }
        flush_interval -1
    }

    header {
        X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
        X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN
    }
}

Just fyi, I'm using Caddy with the above config, if you want me to try a different reverse proxy or a different config let me know.

[hawkeye217]

Thanks. The second HAR file showed that the changes I made in the custom build to fix the preview frames slowdown significantly improved (13s to 594ms). So I'll put up a PR for that change soon here.

However, the HAR didn't show any evidence of a hang. Just to confirm, did you capture it before and during the time you experienced the hour loading issue?

And does the browser console show any messages during the time that it freezes?

[yousaf465]

How to use dev builds with Home Assistant apps? Currently on frigate full access beta

[NickM-27]

You can't, you'll have to wait until the beta

[leccelecce]

I don't know if this is at all related to the hour-mark seeking issue mentioned above, but I find the "rewind 10s" button won't go backwards past the hour, it only goes to e.g 17:59:59 (according to camera's own timestamp, so maybe actually 18:00:00 to Frigate). You can click it as many times as you like, it won't backwards further.
Going forward into the hour e..g from 17:59:55 to 18:00:05 works fine.
frigate.har.txt

[NickM-27]

yeah, someone else reported this, I believe this is just a logic bug, I will take a look