Setting Up Video Feeds & Frigate with Dashie

Dashie's Video Feeds turn your dashboard into a live security monitor. Camera feeds can sit permanently in a sidebar strip, or pop up automatically the moment motion is detected at your front door, in the nursery, or by the pool. When a camera is powered by Frigate, Dashie adds a full recording timeline so you can scrub back through the day and replay detected events — all without leaving your dashboard.

About Dashie Video Feeds

A feed is a single camera. You define each feed once — its source, a name, and a quality setting — and it becomes available on every Dashie tablet in your home. Each tablet then decides how it wants to use that feed: always-on, motion-triggered, or hidden entirely. This split is the heart of the system: feeds are shared across the household, but how each device reacts to them is set per device.

On screen, feeds appear as cards that you can drag, pin, maximize, or dismiss. For Frigate cameras, a playback button on the card opens a recording timeline with event thumbnails — a lightweight version of the Frigate UI, built right into your dashboard.

How It Works

Dashie does not talk to your cameras directly. Everything flows through the Dashie Home Assistant integration, which acts as a smart proxy: it resolves camera entities to playable streams, watches your motion sensors and pushes alerts to each tablet, and relays requests to Frigate for recordings and events.

When you watch a feed, the integration first sends a lightweight stream that starts instantly, then transparently upgrades a focused or maximized card to a higher-quality stream with audio.

Part 1: Add a Video Feed

Feeds are managed from Dashie's native settings on the tablet. Add a feed on one tablet and it appears on all of them.

Part 2: Subscription Modes & Triggers

Each feed has a subscription mode that controls how this tablet reacts to it. Open a feed from the Video Feeds list to see the four options.

Setting Up a Trigger

For Trigger and Trigger + Alert modes to do anything, the feed needs a Trigger Entity — the Home Assistant sensor that decides "show this camera now." Edit the feed and, under the Trigger section, pick a binary_sensor or input_boolean. Common choices:

• A door/window contact sensor — binary_sensor.front_door
• A motion sensor — binary_sensor.driveway_motion
• A Frigate detection sensor — binary_sensor.front_door_person

When that entity turns on, the Dashie integration pushes a trigger to your tablets, and any tablet subscribed in a Trigger mode pops the camera up. The trigger is an ordinary Home Assistant state change, so anything you can model as a binary sensor — an automation, a helper toggle, a Frigate event — can drive a feed.

Trigger Sounds and Timing

These options fine-tune what happens when a feed pops up:

• Trigger Sound — For Trigger + Alert feeds, choose from a set of built-in chimes (bells, chimes, wood knocks, and more). You can preview each one before saving.
• Auto-Dismiss — How long a popped-up feed stays on screen before closing itself (default 30 seconds, adjustable 0–300). Set to 0 to keep it up until dismissed manually.
• Display while Active — Keep the feed on screen as long as the trigger sensor stays on, dismissing only once motion clears.
• Cooldown — A quiet period after a feed dismisses, so a flickering sensor doesn't pop the same camera over and over (0–300 seconds).

Part 3: Display Settings

At the bottom of the Video Feeds settings screen, Display Settings control where feed cards appear and how big they are. These are set per tablet.

Display Method

• Sidebar — Feeds dock as a vertical strip along the right edge. Cards can be dragged out to float anywhere on the dashboard. Best for an always-on monitoring layout.
• Notification — Triggered feeds appear centered toward the bottom of the screen, like an alert. Up to four cards arrange into a grid. Best when you mostly want pop-ups, not a permanent strip.

Feed Size

Cards are 16:9 and sized as a percentage of the screen width:

• Small — 25% of screen width
• Medium — 33% (the default)
• Large — 50%
• Extra Large — 75%

Part 4: Frigate Integration

If you run Frigate, Dashie unlocks recording playback on top of the live view — no extra configuration in Dashie required. It detects Frigate cameras for you.

How Dashie Detects a Frigate Camera

The integration asks Frigate for its list of camera names and then matches each of your feeds against them. A feed is recognized as a Frigate camera if any of these line up with a Frigate camera name:

• The go2rtc stream name
• The feed's name (lowercased, spaces become underscores — "Family Room" → family_room)
• The camera entity's ID containing the camera name (e.g. camera.pool_camera_sd_stream matches the Frigate camera pool)

When there's a match, the feed shows "Frigate playback enabled" in the list, and its Frigate Camera field reads auto-detected. If the auto-match is wrong, edit the feed and set the Frigate Camera override to a specific camera, or to None to treat the feed as live-only.

What to Enable on the Frigate Side

• Recording — The camera needs record enabled in Frigate. Continuous recording gives you a full, scrubbable timeline; record-on-motion gives you blue segments only where there was activity.
• Detection & snapshots/clips — To get the event thumbnails on the right side of the playback view, the camera needs object detection with clips enabled, so Frigate stores replayable events.
• Resolution — Frigate records at full camera resolution, which can exceed what a tablet can decode. Keep cameras at 1080p or below for playback, or have Frigate/go2rtc provide a downscaled stream (more on this in Part 6).

Part 5: Frigate Clip & Recording Playback

Tap the playback icon on a Frigate camera card to switch from live view into playback mode. The card expands into a full timeline view.

The Timeline

Along the bottom is a scrollable timeline. Blue segments mark where Frigate has recorded footage, and small colored dots mark detected events (orange for people, blue for cars, and so on). The timeline is "Tapo-style": a fixed marker stays in the center and the timeline scrolls beneath it, with the current time shown above the marker.

• Scrub — Drag the timeline left or right. When you stop, Dashie loads the recording at that moment and starts playing.
• Zoom — Use the magnifier + / − buttons to zoom from a wide multi-hour view down to fine, minute-level scrubbing.
• Go to Live — The pill in the corner shows ● LIVE when you're watching the live stream, or Go to Live when you're in a recording. Tap it (or scrub all the way to "now") to jump back to live.

Event Thumbnails

The column on the right lists recent detected events, each with a snapshot, a timestamp, and the type of object. Tap an event to jump straight to that clip. Events without a stored clip show a brief "Clip not recorded" note instead of playing.

As a clip plays out, Dashie automatically continues into the next segment of recording, so you can watch a stretch of the day continuously. When playback catches up to the present, it returns to the live stream on its own.

Part 6: Using a Dashie Tablet as a Camera (Advanced)

A spare Dashie tablet or TV stick can publish its own front camera as a video feed that the rest of your home — and Frigate — can watch. This is great for a nursery cam, a pet cam, or a second angle on a room.

Turn On the Device Camera

Enable the device's RTSP camera in Dashie settings. The device starts an on-board RTSP server (hardware-encoded H.264, on port 8554) and the Dashie HA integration exposes it as a normal Home Assistant camera entity, e.g. camera.<device>_camera. From there you can add it as a feed on other tablets exactly like any other camera (Part 1), and other Dashie tablets can view it live with no extra setup.

The go2rtc Re-Encode

In the go2rtc configuration that Frigate uses, wrap the tablet's stream with an FFmpeg transcode. The second line is what does the work:

Then point a Frigate camera at the nursery_tablet go2rtc stream and enable detect/record as usual. This re-encode is a manual entry you maintain on the Frigate/go2rtc host — Dashie doesn't write it for you, because it lives in Frigate's own configuration.

Troubleshooting

A feed shows a black card or won't load

• Confirm the Dashie Home Assistant integration is installed and online — it's required for every feed
• For a camera entity, open it in Home Assistant first to confirm the stream itself works
• For an RTSP URL, double-check the address, port, and credentials
• Make sure the tablet and Home Assistant are on the same local network

A triggered feed never pops up

• Check that this tablet's subscription mode for the feed is Trigger or Trigger + Alert, not On-demand
• Confirm the feed has a Trigger Entity bound and that the entity actually turns on in Home Assistant when you expect
• Make sure Enable Video Feeds is on, and that alerts aren't muted (bell icon in the volume popout)
• Watch the Cooldown window — a feed won't re-pop during its cooldown period

No playback icon on a Frigate camera

• The feed must be recognized as a Frigate camera — check that its Frigate Camera field shows a name (auto-detected) and isn't set to None
• If auto-detection missed it, set the Frigate Camera override manually in the feed's settings
• Confirm the camera name in Frigate matches what Dashie is trying to match against (the feed name, entity ID, or go2rtc stream name)

The timeline is empty or has no blue segments

• The camera needs record enabled in Frigate — without recordings there's nothing to scrub
• Blue segments only appear where footage exists; record-on-motion cameras will have gaps
• Give Frigate a few minutes after enabling recording before footage shows up

A clip won't play ("resolution too high")

• Lower the camera's recording resolution to 1080p or below in the camera/Frigate settings
• Or provide a downscaled stream via go2rtc/Frigate so the tablet can decode it

A Dashie-tablet camera plays live but won't record in Frigate

• This is the SPS/PPS issue from Part 6 — add the FFmpeg re-encode to the go2rtc stream Frigate uses
• A plain #video=copy remux won't fix it; use #video=h264 so the stream is fully transcoded