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Home Assistant as security camera PVR?? (piefed.ca)

submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been running a very simple Home Assistant setup for a while now - just a few lights and a door lock. I've added a bit of monitoring and data gathering basically to see how MQTT works.

I installed a Reolink camera intending to setup Frigate PVR and do all the good stuff (including more cameras) with that, but my hardware is old and I need a TPU and they're all out of stock and back ordered until October, at best. I've tried ZoneMinder but couldn't get over all the false positives with fog and rain etc. So, I had given up on my camera project for a while.

Then I installed the Reolink integration in Home Assistant and see that it has basic "AI" capability and I can trigger automations based on "person seen" etc. I already created a basic "save 30 seconds of video if you see a person". I've got pretty basic requirements and can probably be happy with a few more basic automations like this, but this seems almost a waste - there is so much capability there. I had a bit of a look in the internal integrations repository and HACS and I can't see anything that looks like a PVR.

Does it exist?

Is it something I shouldn't be trying to do with Home Assistant? There was no noticeable increase in CPU usage when I enabled my test automation so I assume the "AI" is happening in the camera. I don't see a downside??

Edit - I've continued working and reading more about the Reolink Integration and now partially answer my own question: I think I'm going to be happy with just the Reolink integration and some automations. It seems to work very well!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think you can do much past just display the live (usually somewhat delayed) camera feeds. If you have some external object detection, you could probably feed the detection events to Frigate. That would make it as efficient as anything you could do natively in HA.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Installed the WebRTC component from HACS and the cameras are less than 3 seconds delayed for me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

Yeah webrtc is one of the best in this regard. Unfortunately I can't display 4 of them on my kiosk tablet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

MotionEye may be worth looking into further. There is an add-on for it. I have used to before on a raspberry Pi to steam video of the washer in the basement so that I could know if it was done from the second floor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

I’ve never done this solely with HA

I will say for my experience blue iris outperforms all competition to the point that I use it over non free software, which I always try to prioritize. Zoneminder is nice but blue iris just works better

I also use reolink Poe cameras, the HA layer is mainly to retain reolink notifications and remote access

Should be possible though. I would suggest HA forums

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Zoneminder is awful. HA has Frigate and its 1000x better than Zoneminder and probably on par with BlueIris. Get it in the Add-On store.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

But is Blue Iris really worth dealing with Windows over? I think Frigate has pretty much caught up by now and is developing quickly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

I would have to evaluate frigate again to say, dunno and it’s been years since I’ve checked. I just have a vm for blue iris that’s solely for blue iris. It’s not the end of the world (though I wouldn’t mind getting rid of it)

There is a docker version but it runs poorly

You’ve inspired me to reevaluate though. If I can kill a windows VM then it’s a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

I've got a similar setup. BlueIris is my NVR but I have the reolink integration on HA to trigger alert notifications that include a screenshot and activate lights at night upon detection. Only downside is that BlueIris is Windows only.

OP, I also think it's probably doable with automations if you're fine without full time recording (suppose you could throw an SD card in the cams for that), but some data management automations that delete clips older than x days are probably good too.