I record my cameras with Synology Surveillance Station and run Frigate for detection, and I got tired of jumping between the two. So I made a custom integration (with a dashboard card) that joins them in Home Assistant.
- SS keeps recording the full-quality stream, like it already does.
- Frigate watches the low-res sub stream and spots people, cars, pets.
- Each Frigate detection becomes a bookmark on SS’s recording, and you scrub through it all on one timeline in HA.
Why detect with Frigate? It is more accurate, you get a much wider choice of models, and you can even run one you trained yourself. A small mini PC running Frigate is enough to replace an expensive Synology DVA.
Playback is SS’s original video, never transcoded. Nothing is recorded twice either: Frigate only keeps short clips and snapshots of its detections.
Also in there: a camera grid that stays in sync, phone notifications that open the recording at that moment, and Frigate’s smart search. Works without Frigate too, as a plain SS viewer.
Install: the easy way is to let a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, …) do it. The repo ships an install skill and a script, so you clone it and ask the agent to install. You can also run the script yourself, or add it to HACS as a custom repository.
Fair warning: so far it has only been tested on my own setup (SS 9.3, DSM 7.2, 4K H.265 cameras, HA 2026.9). It needs testing on more setups, so any feedback is welcome, bugs included.