Missing ffmpeg and no permission for /dev/video0

1

greetings fellow totally organic lifeforms,

i’ve installed homeassistant to use as a frigate server for a single usb webcam

  • stallation method Home Assistant OS
  • Core 2026.2.1
  • Supervisor 2026.01.1
  • Operating System 17.0
  • Frontend 20260128.6

i’ve run through the basic setup and installed the full frigate app but i’m running in some problems.

  1. ffmpeg isn’t installed by default. i tried to fix this by adding the following lines to my configuration.yaml
    ffmpeg:
    ffmpeg_bin: /usr/bin/ffmpeg

no dice but i can manually install ffmpeg through the terminal using
“apk update && apk add ffmpeg” but this causes operation not permitted on /dev/video0 errors so we get to error 2

  1. accessing /dev/video0 in anyway gives an operation not permitted. sudo chmod -R 777 /dev/video0 gives me an read only filesystem error
2

Be sure to restart after adding this in the configuration.yaml, as it explains in the docs.

3

did that a couple times already even if i install ffmpeg manually using apk next boot it’ll be gone