How to disable saving to a folder \media\frigate\clips\previews

[Trzinka]

Hi.

How to disable saving to a folder \media\frigate\clips\previews because the recording is in some weird format and is completely useless.

Example setting:

  Diane:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://192.168.1.42:8554/Di-HD
          roles:
            - detect
            - record
      output_args:
        record: preset-record-generic-audio-aac
    best_image_timeout: 1

    detect:
      enabled: true
      width: 1920
      height: 1080
      fps: 10
#      max_disappeared: 25
#      stationary:
#        interval: 30
#        threshold: 20

    objects:
      track:
        - person
        - car
        - bicycle
        - motorcycle
      filters:
        person:
          threshold: 0.72
        car:
          threshold: 0.72
        bicycle:
          threshold: 0.72
        motorcycle:
          threshold: 0.72

    motion:
      threshold: 30
      contour_area: 10
      frame_height: 50
      improve_contrast: 'true'
      mask:
        - 0.005,0.011,0.252,0.013,0.252,0.056,0.005,0.06
        - 0,0.401,0.029,0.365,0.065,0.321,0.096,0.281,0.142,0.214,0.123,0.18,0.098,0.133,0.098,0.062,0.095,0,-0.001,0.001

    record:
      enabled: true
      retain:
        days: 3
        mode: active_objects
      events:
        pre_capture: 2
        post_capture: 5
        retain:
          default: 3
          mode: active_objects

    snapshots:
      enabled: true
      timestamp: true
      bounding_box: true
      crop: false
      retain:
        default: 3

Any idea?
Thank you.

[hawkeye217]

These videos are called previews and are used by the frigate UI for various purposes. You cannot disable them in 0.14.

They will be deleted based on your configured retention policy.

In the next version of Frigate, previews are only saved if recording is enabled.

[Trzinka]

Hi. Thanks for the reply.

Does Frigate still use these recordings later because they are of poor quality and obviously Frigate takes these recordings itself after a certain time as a kind of summary of what is happening, because at the moment, after restarting and deleting all the folders (45 minutes ago) in the frigate folder, I still don't have any files. Does it work for an hour? And what is that supposed to be for?

[hawkeye217]

Frigate creates preview videos for your cameras at the start of every hour.

[Trzinka]

Thanks for the reply.
But I don't understand what the purpose of these recordings is because the
video resolution is: 320x180 and the
frame rate is: 0.167989, the
length of the recording is about 45 minutes,
and in addition, nothing happens for most of the recording and it just takes up space on the disk, especially if I wanted to save it for longer time!?

[NickM-27]

It allows the ability to scrub to see what happened. Full res recordings don't scrub efficiently so this allows the user to scrub and see what happened so it is easy to move to different parts of the recording.

It also provides the gifs for the filmstrip at the top of live and the video when you hover or swipe left on mobile.

The fps is so low because it only saves frames when there is motion. This allows the files to be smaller than a single snapshot even for an entire hour worth.

[hawkeye217]

Previews are used in the frigate UI. When you scrub the timeline in motion review mode, the low resolution preview is used, for example. This is to save bandwidth and resources.