Reolink Cameras, Frigate and Home Assistant: A Practical Setup Guide
Home Assistant can use Reolink cameras directly, while Frigate adds recording, object detection and a much richer camera workflow. This guide covers the structure of the setup from my Reolink and Frigate walkthrough.
1. Add the Reolink integration
Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration and add Reolink. Use the credentials configured on the camera itself rather than assuming they are the same as a cloud account.
2. Check disabled entities
Home Assistant may leave higher-resolution streams or less commonly used camera entities disabled by default. Open the device’s entities and enable the ones you actually need.
3. Decide where Frigate will run
Frigate can require significant processing, particularly with several cameras and object detection. I run it separately rather than making the Home Assistant machine do everything. Hardware acceleration and an appropriate detector can substantially reduce the processing load.
4. Add camera streams to Frigate
Configure the camera streams in Frigate. Reolink models can expose different stream names for main/high-resolution and sub/low-resolution feeds. Check the documentation for your exact camera rather than copying stream paths blindly.
5. Detect low, record high
A useful approach is to perform object detection on the lower-resolution substream while recording the higher-resolution stream. That gives the detector fewer pixels to process without sacrificing the quality of saved footage.
6. Configure objects, zones and masks
Only ask Frigate to detect things you care about. Zones and masks can stop irrelevant movement dominating detections, while confidence thresholds help reduce shadows or objects being mistaken for people and cars.
7. Add the Advanced Camera Card
The Advanced Camera Card from HACS provides a flexible Home Assistant camera interface. It can work with camera entities directly and exposes additional timeline/review features when used with Frigate.
Security
Use strong camera passwords, keep camera firmware maintained and avoid exposing camera administration interfaces directly to the public internet.