Feature Request: Event Playback with Debug

[torsteinelv]

Labels: enhancement, UI, debug

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Summary

Add an option to replay recorded events with debug overlays enabled, including motion masks and detection zones, to help users understand why events were triggered or ended prematurely.

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Motivation

When training and deploying custom models, it’s often difficult to diagnose why certain detections fail or why events stop too early. Currently, motion masks are static and not easily tunable for different lighting conditions (e.g., nighttime). Having visibility into how masks behaved during an event would allow users to fine-tune settings and improve detection accuracy.

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Proposed Solution

• Add a “Replay with Debug” button under the Events tab in the UI.
• During playback, overlay:
  • Motion masks
  • Detection zones
  • Object bounding boxes
• Optionally include:
  • A timeline showing confidence scores and motion activity.
• Allow exporting this debug view for troubleshooting.

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Additional Ideas

• Enable separate motion mask tuning profiles for day/night conditions.
• Provide a toggle in configuration for saving debug data alongside events.

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Technical Considerations

• Frigate already has a debug pipeline for live streams (bounding boxes, masks).
• This feature could reuse the same overlay logic but apply it to recorded segments.
• Motion mask data could be stored as metadata during event recording for later replay.
• UI could leverage existing event player with an additional debug layer.

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Use Case

• Users with custom-trained models can analyze why detections fail under certain conditions.
• Helps optimize motion masks for low-light environments without guesswork.

[hawkeye217]

This is a duplicate of #1914

You can already accomplish this yourself with a dummy camera. See the 0.17 beta docs (though this can be done on versions before 0.17 beta): https://deploy-preview-19787--frigate-docs.netlify.app/troubleshooting/dummy-camera