Add your first camera

import { Aside } from “@astrojs/starlight/components”;

This walkthrough is in active development. The end-to-end UI flow may drift between releases; if anything below doesn't match what you see in the app, the most authoritative source is the **Help → Add camera** menu inside Fregata itself.

What you’ll need

• An IP camera that exposes an RTSP stream (most do — common URL shapes are rtsp://user:pass@CAMERA_IP:554/stream1 for Reolink, Amcrest, Lorex, and similar brands).
• The camera’s IP address and credentials.
• A network path between your Mac and the camera. LAN is by far the most common.

Steps

1. Open Fregata’s web UI from the menu-bar tray (Open Web UI → opens localhost:8971 in your default browser).
2. Click Cameras → Add camera.
3. Paste the RTSP URL into the connection field.
4. Optionally tweak detection options (resolution, framerate, motion mask). The defaults are sane for most outdoor cameras.
5. Save.

The camera should appear in the live tile grid within a few seconds. Detection runs automatically on every camera by default; you’ll see green bounding boxes around moving objects with the class label and confidence score.

Verifying detection is on the ANE

Open the menu-bar tray. The Detector row shows the per-frame inference time:

• ~1–3 ms per frame: detection is on the ANE (correct).
• 50+ ms per frame: detection has fallen back to CPU (wrong — the bundled CoreML model didn’t load). Restart the app and check the Logs view in the tray for an ane_init error.

Where Fregata stores recordings

Recordings live under ~/Library/Application Support/Fregata/recordings/ by default. You can change the location in the Storage preferences pane. Retention is per-camera and defaults to 14 days; bump or trim to taste.