how to disable cameras by default in frigate

[visual trench]

Frigate 0.16 has on-demand recording but I'm trying to understand how to use it or if I should use it at all.

I want to have some cameras setup that are visible in frigate but only enable recording/snapshots if I'm away from the house. This seems like a challenge because currently every time I restart frigate it starts recording again. I could potentially create some automations in HA that track when the addon starts and tell it to stop recording but even then there's a blip where recording is enabled until the automation runs. Does anyone know a way around this so that the camera is not recording by default but then I can tell it to start for a period of time? Is the answer to disable recording in the config and then use on-demand recording via automations?

For example if I disable recording in the config then I can't enable it from the UI. And if I start an on-demand recording then it says it will only save snapshots. So basically I seem forced to have recording enabled in the config which puts me into this race condition where I don't want it to actually record by default.

it seems like the primary way to control this is via MQTT which can set the state persistently... would love to know if there's a better way

even setting it in MQTT doesn't appear to be persistent, when frigate starts up it just resumes the camera to recording

seems only if I publish messages with retain=yes will it work but the HA addon switches don't set retain by default so I can't use them and have to publish directly to MQTT instead 🙁