Integrating the Loxone Intercom with Frigate can quickly become a rabbit hole. While Loxone does expose an MJPEG stream, it's not officially documented for third-party use, and accessing it requires digging through forums or dissecting the web interface traffic. Once you do get the stream URL, you'll likely encounter challenges like inconsistent authentication behavior, non-standard frame handling, or the stream just randomly dropping — none of which Frigate handles gracefully out of the box.
Even if you manage to get the video feed into Frigate, you're not out of the woods. The intercom's resolution and frame rate aren't ideal for object detection, and any downtime or format hiccups can break detection or flood your logs with errors. It’s doable with enough persistence, but definitely not beginner-friendly.
The Loxone intercom provides an undocumented stream which you can find under following url:
http://<ip-adress>/mjpg/video.mjpg
Here you are prompted to login via basic auth with an admin username and password. After entering it you should have access to the stream.
You would think now that you should be able to access the stream with:
<username>:<password>@<ip-adress>/mjpg/video.mjpg
But this is not the case. Loxone does not allow you to access the intercom that way. This is what makes the whole process of integrating it into Frigate tricky.
Loxone does not provide support for any protocols other than MJPEG, including RTSP on port 554 which you will most likely use for the most cameras.
MJPEG is not that good for video processing because it requires more cpu power to process compared to a RTSP-Stream.
A basic example template for the loxone intercom is the following:
loxone-intercom:
ffmpeg:
inputs:
- path: http://<your-ip>/mjpg/video.mjpg
input_args:
- -headers
- 'Authorization: Basic <your-credentials in base64>'
roles:
- detect
detect:
width: 1280
height: 720
fps: 5
As mentioned before, Loxone does not allow you to authenticate via the normal basic auth in the url. It’s actually a good thing that the Loxone Intercom doesn’t accept basic auth in the URL (user:pass@ip) because it avoids exposing credentials in plaintext over logs, browser history, or config files. This forces more secure handling of authentication, reducing the risk of accidental credential leaks.
But that also means it is more annoying to work with. But there is a work around. With that you can still use basic auth but it is a little bit more secure that way.
You set it up via the headers of the request.
As previously stated, Loxone does not permit authentication via basic authentication in the URL. It is beneficial that the Loxone Intercom does not accept basic authentication in the URL (user:pass@ip), as it prevents credentials from being exposed in plaintext in logs, browser history. This approach promotes more secure authentication management, reducing the risk of unintentional credential exposure.
But that also means it is more annoying to work with. However, a workaround is available. It is still possible to use basic authentication if you are doing it via the headers.
That is why we need to specify extra input_args in the config file and there we can define a basic auth header.
This wont take your credentials as they are. You need to convert them into a base 64 string.
You can do that quite easily. Open your linux server shell and execute following:
echo "<username>:<password>" | base64
This will give you your credentials encoded in base64. You need to enter it into your configuration.
Now you can save the config and restart frigate. You should be abe to see the stream of the loxone intercom.