Hi All,
I've been a Home Assistant user since 2016 (before HAOS even existed!). HA runs every part of my home and much of my life.
I've also been a fan and avid user of the excellent privacy-first local Frigate NVR (https://frigate.video if you're unfamiliar) that integrated perfectly with HA for tons of automations like turning on lights when people arrive (instead of dumb motion detectors), videoing wildlife, porch package notifications, knowing if the gate or garage door was left open via AI video classification, and tons more. Being able to automate your home based on what your cameras see has been a game changer.
For the last year or so I've been running Frigate as a docker container on my Mac Mini. While this setup worked, and was kind of energy efficient, CPU usage was high and it felt like I was leaving a LOT of the performance and benefits of Apple Silicon on the table.
As many of you know, Docker on Mac runs containers inside of a Linux VM, blocking container access to the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), GPU, and the hardware media decoding/encoding Media Engine. As well as adding VM overhead, this prevents Frigate running on docker from using any of that hardware for things like AI object detection, hardware accelerated video stream decoding/encoding, Frigate's AI Enrichments, and more.
Enter Fregata (Fregata is the scientific genus that frigatebirds belong to).
Fregata ports the runtime Frigate needs (think process supervisor, RAM disk management, environment variables, inter-process communication, shared memory, etc) that is normally provided by Docker into a native Mac .app, signed and notarized by Apple.
Additionally we added and maintain a Apple Core ML AI object detector written in Rust that uses the ANE and hardware-accelerated frame cropping, plus hundreds of other Frigate optimizations and tweaks specific to macOS.
Fregata is the runtime that RUNS a macOS-customized version of Frigate. We'll keep Fregata up to date with upstream Frigate releases.
All Frigate features work as usual (including Frigate+) and the full HA integration we all know and love, just massively accelerated by Apple Silicon.
The result is AI object detection inference times of 1-2ms on the ANE, stream decode/encode accelerated by Apple's Media Engine, GPU-accelerated Frigate enrichments, very minimal CPU usage, and the extreme energy efficiency of the Mac Mini (or any Apple Silicon Mac you have laying around).
We just exited Beta and published our first GA release (based on Frigate 0.17.1). The normal 30-day free trial has been extended through Oct 31 (5 months). After that, there is a $10 license fee to continue so my company can continue development and keep up with Frigate releases. We want it to be a product people can depend on, instead of a hobby.
Just for the HA community: If you can't afford a license, get in touch here via DM and we'll gladly help you out.
You can check it out at Fregata.app
Any and all user feedback is very welcome and happy to answer any questions you have. If you're a Mac user that runs Frigate, we think you'll be very pleased with Fregata, it's the fastest way to run Frigate with energy efficiency.