Recordings and the timeline

Every camera’s recordings open on a timeline: the picture at the top, a strip showing what happened under it, and the reviews in view below that. You get there from a camera’s History button, from a card in Recent Alerts, from a review in the Review tab, or by tapping an alert. Recordings go back as far as your server keeps them.

**Span**: how much time the strip shows, from **5 m** to **24 h**. A shorter span places the playhead to the second.

**LIVE**: back to the camera’s live view.

**Export** and **Calendar**: save a clip, or jump to another day.

**The strip**: drag it to scrub. See Reading the strip.

**Playback**: previous review, back 10 seconds, play or pause, forward 10 seconds, next review, and speed.

**On this timeline**: every review in the span, newest first. Tap one to jump to it.

**Review details**: what’s in the review that’s playing. Tap to open.

Reading the strip

The strip has two lanes, and the violet line across both is the playhead:

The top lane is footage. Grey where there’s a recording, and brighter where there was motion. Gaps are times with no recording.
The bottom lane is reviews, coloured by severity: amber for alerts, violet for detections, grey for motion only.

The legend under the strip says the same. Drag anywhere on the strip to scrub, and the picture follows your finger with quick previews of each moment. Over a slow connection, the previews take a moment longer to fill in.

Move around

⏮ and ⏭ jump to the previous or next review, skipping the quiet stretches in between.
10 with the arrows goes back or forward ten seconds.
1× opens a menu of speeds: 0.5×, 1× and 2×.
Pinch the picture to zoom, and double-tap a spot, just as in live view.
The calendar button opens Jump to a day:

A bar under each day shows how much of it was recorded; a day with no bar has no footage.

On this timeline

The list under the strip holds the reviews in the span you’re looking at. Alerts, Detections and All choose which, and the one playing is outlined. If the list is empty, it suggests another choice, such as No alerts in this stretch. Try Detections or All.

Review details

The bar at the bottom describes the review that’s playing. Tap it to open Review details:

AI summary: when your server’s GenAI writes review summaries, the summary of what happened, with its own headline. Frigate writes these only for the cameras it’s set up to.
In frame: every object Frigate tracked in the review, with its confidence. Tap an object to jump to the moment it appeared; ⓘ opens its event in Explore.
Heard: sounds that audio detection picked up.

Between reviews, the bar says Between reviews.

Export a clip

Scrub to the moment you want, then tap the export button.
The clip starts 15 seconds before the playhead and ends 15 seconds after. Adjust Start and End with −30, −5, +5 and +30.
Tap Export clip. A progress bar shows the download.
Choose where it goes from the share sheet: Save Video puts it in Photos, or send it straight to someone.

A clip can be up to ten minutes long. For anything longer, use Frigate’s own export in its web interface. Exporting downloads the clip from your server, so a long one over mobile data costs its size: about a megabyte a second for a high-resolution camera.

Playback stats

The gauge at the top shows how playback is going: what’s Buffered, the Position, any Stalls, and on Fregata NVR, which step of the server’s quality ladder is playing. Useful when recordings play badly over a slow connection.