Common Error Messages

This page is an index of error messages you might see in Frigate's logs, what each one means, and where to go next. It is organized by the kind of problem, not by which component logged the message.

Two things to know before you start:

• Many of these messages come from FFmpeg, go2rtc, GPU drivers, or the operating system, not from Frigate itself. Frigate captures and re-logs their output, so the log level shown in the Frigate UI does not always reflect the original severity.
• Wrapped errors put the real cause on the next line. When Frigate logs a generic message like Error occurred when attempting to maintain recording cache, the actual exception is logged immediately after it. When a camera's FFmpeg process exits, Frigate logs The following ffmpeg logs include the last 100 lines prior to exit and dumps that camera's FFmpeg output. Always read those lines, they are where the answer usually is.

Camera connection and streams

These are FFmpeg errors about reaching the camera (or the go2rtc restream). Connection refused and No route to host mean nothing is listening at that address or the host is unreachable; 401 Unauthorized is wrong credentials; 404 Not Found is a wrong stream path (or a restream input pointing at a go2rtc stream name that does not exist). A camera that has hit its concurrent-connection limit can also return refused or 401 on a URL that works in VLC.

See go2rtc troubleshooting for how to isolate the stream.

FFmpeg is running but has stopped delivering video for 20 seconds, so Frigate's camera watchdog restarts it. The stream connected at least once, then went quiet: a camera reboot, a network drop, the camera evicting the connection, or a stalled decoder. If it repeats on a loop, the stream is unstable.

The detect FFmpeg process exited on its own. This message is only the notification; the cause is in the 100 FFmpeg log lines Frigate dumps right after it (look for a Failed to sync surface, Connection refused, codec, or audio error in that block). Related watchdog messages include <camera> exceeded fps limit, which means the camera is delivering frames faster than detect.fps (usually a camera whose real frame rate differs from what is configured).

An FFmpeg message meaning the camera sent packets with out-of-order timestamps. Because recordings are copied without re-encoding, FFmpeg cannot fix them, and the segment muxer often splits early, producing one-second segments and a cache backlog. The usual cause is a camera "Smart Codec" / H.264+ / H.265+ mode or a camera clock that jumps.

See Recordings: segments are only 1 second long.

An FFmpeg message meaning RTP packets arrived out of sequence, which almost always means the stream is using UDP transport. Frigate's RTSP presets force TCP, so seeing this points at a custom input_args, preset-rtsp-udp, or a go2rtc source that is not using TCP. Switch to TCP unless your camera is UDP-only.

FFmpeg decoder messages meaning the received video bitstream was incomplete or damaged. A few of these at every stream start are normal (the decoder connected before the first keyframe) and Frigate discards them. A continuous stream of them means real packet loss, from Wi-Fi or a saturated link, an overloaded camera, or an FFmpeg restart loop caused by another problem. Fix the underlying instability rather than the message.

An FFmpeg message meaning it probed the stream but never saw enough decodable video to determine the frame size, often because the probe window ended before the first keyframe on a long-GOP stream, or because the stream is not delivering usable video. If it is a Reolink HTTP stream, use preset-http-reolink, which raises the probe size for exactly this case.

Recording

Frigate's record watchdog is restarting the record FFmpeg process because no valid segment has reached the cache. This means the record stream is not connecting or the segments are being rejected (see the audio-codec entry below).

See Recordings: the record stream isn't connecting.

A cached recording segment failed validation (no readable video stream) and was deleted. The most common cause is a segment that was truncated because the record FFmpeg process was killed mid-write, so this often appears alongside, and as a consequence of, the record-stream restarts above. A segment containing only audio triggers it too.

Some camera audio codecs (G.711 variants such as pcm_alaw and pcm_mulaw) cannot be stored in an MP4 container, so segments never finalize even though live view works.

See Recordings: incompatible audio codec for the FFmpeg preset that transcodes the audio to AAC.

A generic wrapper; the real exception is on the next log line. Frequently it is [Errno 28] No space left on device or [Errno 17] File exists on a network share.

See Recordings cache warnings and errors, which covers this message and the common Errno cases.

Hardware acceleration

A VAAPI/QSV hardware frame-sync failure between FFmpeg and the GPU driver, not a Frigate bug. It usually appears when the detect stream is being scaled or decoded on the GPU.

See GPU: Failed to download frame: -5, which lists the fixes in order (switch VAAPI/QSV preset, change LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME, use an H.264 substream, match detect resolution and fps to the stream).

Both mean the GPU ran out of decode surfaces: No decoder surfaces left is NVIDIA NVDEC, Can't allocate a surface is Intel QSV. This is surface-pool exhaustion, typically from too many concurrent hardware-decoded cameras on one GPU (consumer NVIDIA cards have a driver-enforced limit on simultaneous decode sessions). Reduce the number of cameras decoding on that GPU, decode some on the CPU, or move to hardware without the session cap.

This comes from the NVIDIA container runtime while starting the container, not from Frigate, and the container never starts. The NVIDIA driver is not loaded on the host. Confirm nvidia-smi works on the host itself (not inside the container) before troubleshooting Frigate. In a VM or LXC, the driver must be available inside the guest. See Hardware: Nvidia GPU.

Detectors and models

The process was killed by the CPU for executing an unsupported instruction. There are two distinct causes in Frigate:

• A Coral EdgeTPU on a newer kernel with an outdated gasket driver. See EdgeTPU: Illegal instruction.
• A CPU without AVX/AVX2, when enabling semantic search, face recognition, license plate recognition, classification, or audio transcription. These features use libraries compiled with AVX and crash immediately on CPUs that lack it (commonly Intel Celeron/Pentium before the 2020 Tiger Lake generation). See the CPU requirements.

ONNX Runtime could not parse the model file. The file exists but its contents are not a valid ONNX model, usually a corrupted or interrupted download in model_cache, or the wrong file pointed at by model.path. Delete the cached model file so Frigate re-downloads it, and confirm model.path points at an actual .onnx model. See ONNX detector configuration.

ONNX Runtime CUDA errors. 999 (cudaErrorUnknown) is a general, unrecoverable CUDA context failure, usually a driver/runtime version mismatch between the host and the container or a GPU in a bad state. 901 is a CUDA-graph capture error, which points at a custom model whose operations are not capture-safe. For 999, align the host driver with the container's CUDA version and confirm the GPU is healthy.

OpenVINO could not find the configured device (usually GPU or NPU). Most often the /dev/dri render node is not passed into the container, or the wrong render node is mapped when an iGPU and a discrete GPU coexist.

See GPU: no supported devices found.

Memory and storage

Frigate ran out of shared memory (/dev/shm). The container's shm_size is too small for the number and resolution of your detect streams, or you added cameras after startup without increasing it.

See Calculating required shm-size. If you cannot increase shm_size, lowering the SHM_MAX_FRAMES environment variable reduces how many frames Frigate buffers per camera.

A filesystem is full: the recordings volume (/media/frigate), the cache tmpfs (/tmp/cache), or /dev/shm. Check which one, and note that inode exhaustion can produce this while df -h still shows free space.

See Recordings: No space left on device.

A silent exit is usually the host or container out-of-memory killer. Because /dev/shm and /tmp/cache are memory-backed, they count against the container's memory limit, so aggressive shm or cache sizing can trigger it. Give the container more memory, or reduce shm/cache sizing, and check the host's OOM messages (dmesg).

Database

SQLite could not acquire the write lock. Frigate's timeout already scales with camera count, so under normal local-disk operation this essentially only happens when the database is on a network share (SMB/NFS), where file locking is unreliable, or when two instances point at the same file.

See Database is locked.

The SQLite database file is corrupted, typically after hard power loss, a network-share database, or a filesystem with unsafe write semantics. Frigate does not repair it automatically, but the database can usually be recovered by hand.

Stop Frigate first, then work on the database file directly (by default /config/frigate.db). Start by checking what is actually wrong:

sqlite3 frigate.db "PRAGMA integrity_check;"

If the only problems reported are index-related (lines such as row 14 missing from index recordings_path or non-unique entry in index ...), rebuilding the indexes is usually enough and is the least destructive fix:

sqlite3 frigate.db "REINDEX;"

If the integrity check reports page or byte-level corruption instead (for example Multiple uses for byte 2706 of page 142272), dump the readable contents into a new database:

# dump what can still be read
sqlite3 frigate.db .dump > frigate.dump

# keep the corrupt file, then rebuild from the dump
mv frigate.db frigate.db.bak
cat frigate.dump | sqlite3 frigate.db

# confirm the rebuilt database is clean, this should print "ok"
sqlite3 frigate.db "PRAGMA integrity_check;"

Rows stored in the corrupted pages cannot be recovered, so expect to lose some tracked objects, review items, or thumbnails. Recordings themselves are files on disk and are not affected.

As a last resort, stop Frigate, delete frigate.db, and restart. Frigate recreates it, but existing recordings lose all of their metadata. If a backup.db exists next to your database, Frigate wrote it before the last schema migration and restoring it recovers everything up to that point.

Repeat corruption usually points at the underlying storage: move the database off a network share, and on Raspberry Pi check power delivery and the SD card or SSD.

Startup and web access

When your config fails validation at startup, Frigate prints the validation errors (with line numbers), then starts in safe mode: a minimal configuration with no cameras and MQTT disabled, so the UI stays reachable. In safe mode the only available page is the Config Editor, which shows the validation errors so you can fix them, then save and restart. Note that recording retention and storage cleanup do not run while in safe mode, so do not leave a low-disk system sitting in it.

Unable to start Frigate in safe mode means even the minimal config failed, which points at an error in your auth, proxy, or database section, or a config file that is not valid YAML at all. Safe mode is not sticky; fix the config and restart and Frigate returns to normal.

The web server is up but the Frigate backend (port 5001) is not answering yet. By far the most common reason is that the page was loaded during startup: the API binds last, after database migrations (which can take minutes on a large database), model downloads, and process startup, while the web server is already serving. Wait for startup to finish. If it persists, the backend has failed to start, and the reason is earlier in the logs. This also explains a connection refused to 127.0.0.1:5001 seen while loading /ws, because every authenticated request first makes an auth subrequest to that port.