Frigate 0.15.0 → 0.18.0

There are several breaking changes in this release, Frigate will attempt to update the configuration automatically. In some cases manual changes may be required. It is always recommended to back up your current config and database before upgrading:

1. Simply copy your current config file to a new location
2. Stop Frigate and make a copy of the frigate.db file

• The TensorRT detector has been removed for Nvidia GPUs, the ONNX detector should be used instead. Nvidia recently pushed newer packages and dropped compatibility for older versions of TensorRT. Supporting native TensorRT detector directly has shown to be a large burden, making supporting newer hardware more difficult and increasing the difficulty in updating ONNX runtime. The decision has been made to remove the TensorRT detector which will allow us to focus on supporting more models and bringing more features to the Nvidia platform through ONNX runtime. Users who were running the TensorRT detector will need to update their configuration to use the ONNX detector, and download a new model. YOLO-NAS or YOLOv9 are recommended as they provide superior performance and accuracy compared to the models supported by TensorRT. Documentation

• The go2rtc audio handling has been updated to accept any audio codec instead of only AAC. This makes it easier to get audio from cameras that use PCMA/U audio. However, if the recording ffmpeg preset preset-record-generic-audio-copy is currently used it likely will need to be changed to preset-record-generic-audio-aac to continue to support audio in recordings.

    ffmpeg:
      ...
      output_args: 
        record: preset-record-generic-audio-aac

• Object detection is now disabled by default. A config migrator will update your config globally with enabled: true for detect:. If you use Frigate with a read-only config, you may need to edit your own config to enable object detection manually.

    detect:
      enabled: true

• Frigate will no longer fall back to look for a ffmpeg binary in PATH. If you are extending the Frigate image or somehow injecting a custom ffmpeg binary in a place like /usr/local/bin, please read the custom ffmpeg build guide.
• Home Assistant Add-on users will need to be aware of several important breaking changes. See the Important Notes for Home Assistant Add-on Users section below.
• The base image for Frigate has been updated to Debian Bookworm. The Jetpack 4 (jp4) and Jetpack 5 (jp5) images have been removed due to not being compatible with the new base image. A new Jetson Jetpack 6 (jp6) build has been contributed by a community member.
• The camera group icon pack has been updated. Some of your camera group icons may need to be re-selected.
• The Hailo driver and firmware has been updated to 4.21.0. The standard Docker image now provides Hailo support. If you are using Home Assistant Operating System, version 16.0 is required. Other users will need to update the Hailo driver and firmware on their system using the user installation script.
• The ROCm migraphx detector has been removed: Instead of separately supporting ROCm via MigraphX and via ONNX, the ROCm (rocm) detector has been removed, and the onnx detector should be used instead. This change should only require changing the type: rocm to type: onnx in detectors
• An additional parameter has been added to movement_weights for autotracking users. A config migrator will add the new value so that Frigate starts, but if this fails or you are using relative zooming with autotracking, you should remove movement_weights from your config and recalibrate.
• Proxy header mapping for user roles is now required or setting the default_role to admin is required to achieve the same functionality as previous versions. This version implements a Viewer role, which is now the default for authenticated users without a role header map defined in the config. If you are using a proxy, you must include admin in your mapped role header in order for admin users to retain their elevated privileges. See the documentation.
• The strftime_fmt config option is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. The UI will now define time formats based on your language and locale.
• Some API routes are now protected and require credentials or changes. With the introduction of the Viewer role and the ability to mark review items as reviewed separately per-user, changes may be needed to any services making calls to Frigate's API.
• Some users may need to adjust the tls_insecure onvif config if ONVIF PTZ controls were previously working in past versions but fail to work in 0.16. The ONVIF package was upgraded for 0.16, and several users have reported that setting tls_insecure: false fixed their issues.

Important Notes for Home Assistant Add-on Users

For Home Assistant add-on users only

The Frigate config directory for add-on users was changed from the Home Assistant config directory to the add-on config directory. With this change, the Frigate config file and database are now part of the add-on backup taken by Home Assistant, no longer needing to backup them manually. Note that only backups after 0.16 will benefit of this change. If you took a backup of Frigate 0.15 when updating to 0.16, the Frigate config file and database will not be part of it. In that case, you should still backup them manually before updating to Frigate 0.16.

Automatic migration

Upon the first Frigate 0.16 initialization, all Frigate-related files will be moved from the Home Assistant config directory to the Frigate add-on config directory. This will mean these files will no longer be accessible through your Home Assistant /config directory. They will now be found in the /addon_configs directory, which can also be accessed through the Terminal or VS Code add-ons.

In the new directory, the Frigate config file will be named config.yml rather than frigate.yml. This aligns with people running Frigate through other means. If you want to move back to Frigate 0.15 and did not backup the config file, you can copy the config.yml from the /addons_config back to /config/frigate.yml before restoring the add-on. Consider copying back other files as well, like custom model, custom ffmpeg, and custom go2rtc. Note that the database from 0.16 is not compatible with Frigate 0.15 anyway and thus should not be copied back. To restore the database, you must restore it from a manual backup.

Moving the config directory between add-on variants

The /addon_configs directory contains the config directories of all add-ons. You can move files from one addon config directory to another, like from Frigate Beta to the stable one, or vice-versa. Make sure you do that before uninstalling the add-on, unless you do not select the Also permanently delete this addon's data when uninstalling it.

Breaking change

If your Frigate config file refers to any arbitrary files in the Home Assistant config dir, like echo:/config/ scripts, their references must be manually updated to from /config/ to /homeassistant/.

• The base image for Frigate has been updated to Debian 12 ("Bookworm") and Python 3.11, bringing many backend performance improvements. WARNING: The popular tteck Proxmox LXC script won't automatically support Frigate 0.16. Changes will need to be made to the script. Proxmox remains an officially unsupported installation method.

There are several breaking changes in this release, Frigate will attempt to update the configuration automatically. In some cases manual changes may be required. It is always recommended to back up your current config and database before upgrading:

1. Simply copy your current config file to a new location
2. Stop Frigate and make a copy of the frigate.db file

• GenAI now supports reviews and object descriptions. As a result, the global genai config now only configures the provider. Other fields have moved under objects -> genai. See the new GenAI documentation.
• Recordings retention is now fully tiered. This means that record -> continuous and record -> motion are separate config fields. See the examples in the documentation.
• Some of the LPR models have been updated, and most users should manually switch to the small model, which performs well on both CPU and GPU. The large model is the same as 0.16's and is not as accurate as the upgraded small model in 0.17. Use large only if you live in a region with multi-line plates and you are having issues detecting text on them with the small model.
• strftime_fmt was deprecated in 0.16, and should now be fully removed from the config in 0.17. Date/time formatting is based on the language selected in the UI.
• The auto detection logic for camera resolution has changed. Some cameras fail to correctly advertise their resolution, and in previous versions, a default value was assumed that was not always correct. You may need to explicitly define detect resolution width and height for cameras in your config if Frigate hangs on startup.
• The exec, expr, and echo sources for go2rtc are now removed by default to reduce the security risk if an attacker has access to the configuration. This can be disabled using an environment variable GO2RTC_ALLOW_ARBITRARY_EXEC A separate configuration for this for HA addon users will come in a later beta. See the documentation.
• Nvidia GTX 900 series GPUs are no longer supported due to updates to ONNX Runtime

There are several breaking changes in this release, Frigate will attempt to update the configuration automatically. In some cases manual changes may be required. It is always recommended to back up your current config and database before upgrading:

1. Simply copy your current config file to a new location
2. Stop Frigate and make a copy of the frigate.db file

• GenAI now supports multiple providers. As a result, the global genai config is now a mapping of keys to GenAI provider setups, and a new roles field defines what tasks each provider will be used for (object descriptions, review summaries, embeddings, chat, etc.). Existing configs will be automatically migrated. Documentation
• Frigate no longer saves annotated JPEG snapshots (.jpg) to disk. Only a clean, unannotated WebP snapshot (<camera>-<id>-clean.webp) is now stored in /media/frigate/clips/. The clean_copy configuration option has been removed — clean snapshots are always saved when snapshots are enabled. The snapshots.quality default has changed from 70 to 60, reflecting the switch from JPEG to WebP encoding. Users who previously relied on the annotated .jpg files on disk should instead use the /api/events/<id>/snapshot.jpg endpoint, which now honors timestamp, bounding_box, crop, height, and quality query parameters for both in-progress and completed tracked objects. When query parameters are omitted, the camera's snapshots config values are used as defaults. Existing configs containing clean_copy will be automatically migrated. Documentation
• The config format for zones and masks has changed to add enabled and friendly_name fields. A config migrator will make the necessary changes, but if migration fails you may need to edit your masks and zones manually.
• Intel GPU stats reporting has changed to no longer require intel_gpu_top and now reads directly from the kernel's per-client DRM usage counters. This removes the need for CAP_PERFMON, privileged mode, or perf_event_paranoid tuning, and adds support for newer Intel GPUs (including Battlemage). Reported usage values may differ from previous versions because the measurement method has changed; the underlying GPU workload is unchanged for the same configuration.
• Note that this change will require a Linux kernel version of 6.5 or newer on your host. Kernels older than 6.5 do not expose per-engine counters for GPUs using GuC submission.
• FFmpeg has been updated to version 8 (excluding the -rk image), and introduces a known issue with go2rtc streams that transcode video using hardware acceleration. A small change to the go2rtc config is required. Documentation
• FFmpeg 5 is deprecated and will be removed from Frigate in 0.19.
• Users running the JinaV2 semantic search model on a GPU will need to run an embeddings reindex due to changes to the CUDA graphs optimization level.
• The /api/export DELETE HTTP API endpoint has been removed and refactored to support bulk deletion of exports. A POST to /api/exports should be used instead. Documentation
• The sync_recordings config option has been removed and replaced by the new Media Sync pane in Settings.
• The timelapse_args export config option has been removed and replaced by custom exporting ffmpeg arguments. Documentation
• The ui.date_format and ui.time_format config options have been removed as these fields have been unused since date/time format and handling has been determined by i18n.
• The DeGirum detector has been removed as the company has ceased operations effective 1 Aug 2026.
• The DeepStack detector is deprecated and will be removed from Frigate in 0.19.