Guides

The guides section is task-oriented: short walkthroughs you can follow when you want to get a specific thing done.

Day-to-day

• The tray menu and Settings — what every menu item does, where settings live on disk, and what the indicators mean.
• Recordings & retention — disk budgets, per-camera retention, alert and detection footage vs. continuous recording.
• Detection tuning — masks, zones, per-object thresholds, ANE vs. GPU, and using your own ONNX or Frigate+ model.
• Adaptive transcoding — enable bandwidth-adaptive HLS playback for recordings and live view; VideoToolbox hardware transcoding on the Media Engine, zero CPU, opt-in per camera. Especially useful for remote and mobile access.
• Apple Intelligence GenAI: generate object and review descriptions, and chat, with the on-device Apple Intelligence model. No server or API key. Needs macOS 27 or later.

Integrations

• Fregata Mobile ↗: the free iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch app for your cameras and alerts (public beta). Its own docs are at mobile.fregata.app/docs.
• Home Assistant — the official Frigate HACS integration, pointed at your Mac.
• Notifications and MQTT: alerts on your phone with Fregata Mobile or Frigate’s browser notifications, and what Fregata publishes over MQTT.

Operations

• Updates & renewals — how Fregata checks for updates, what your license covers, and how to renew.
• Performance — diagnosing CPU spikes, inference time, RAM-disk sizing, and the perf-logging env var.
• Moving & uninstalling — taking Fregata to a different Mac, and the clean-up steps when you’re done with it.
• Troubleshooting — common error messages and what to try, indexed by the exact string the app surfaces.
• Getting help — GitHub Discussions for community support, email the team directly, or attach a one-click diagnostic bundle.