Bird Buddy Livestream — watch your feeder's live camera in Home Assistant

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Bird Buddy has no official Home Assistant integration, and the excellent ha-birdbuddy covers sensors and postcards but not the live view. So I built one that does.

It adds a camera entity per feeder, with live video, on/off control, and an automatic stop timer so a forgotten stream can’t flatten the battery.

A few things worth knowing up front:

  • The feeder sleeps, so starting a stream takes 20–90 seconds. The first click usually says “waking up” — that’s normal, click again.
  • The camera card stays blank when nobody’s watching. Deliberate: fetching thumbnails would wake the feeder on every dashboard refresh.
  • Bird Buddy streams in HEVC, which only plays in Safari. Point the integration at go2rtc (one field in the settings) and it transcodes to H.264 for every browser. Strongly recommended.
  • Only one live session per account — close the app if the stream won’t start.
  • Needs a Bird Buddy account with email and password; Google/Facebook sign-in won’t work.

Getting there was a fair bit of protocol archaeology: the session state machine, a ten-second gap after the API reports “active” but before video actually flows, and expiring stream URLs that need refreshing mid-session. All documented in the advanced guide if you’re curious.

Install via HACS as a custom repository: https://github.com/barloew/birdbuddy_livestream

English and Dutch translations included. Feedback and bug reports welcome — note the newer WebRTC-based v2 feeder isn’t supported yet.

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Changelog

1.2.0

A large release. The livestream now opens on the first click, the camera card
shows something useful while the feeder sleeps, and feeders on permanent power
can keep the stream up for a recorder such as Frigate — during the hours the
feeder is awake, since it still powers its camera down at night.

Opening the stream on the first click

Waking a Bird Buddy takes twenty to ninety seconds, while Home Assistant gives
stream_source() ten and does not retry. Previously the first click always
reported that the feeder was waking up and you had to click again.

With go2rtc configured, the integration now hands Home Assistant a holding
pattern that plays immediately, wakes the feeder in the background, and swaps in
the live picture as soon as it is ready. One click. This is the Open the
stream on the first click setting, on by default; without go2rtc the old
behaviour remains.

A preview image instead of a blank card

The card no longer stays empty while nobody is watching. Choose what it shows:
the last frame of your previous stream, a picture from another entity such as
the recent-visitor sensor from ha-birdbuddy, or a fixed image file. The current
status is written across it, so the wake-up is self-explanatory rather than
looking broken.

Fetching a real thumbnail would wake the feeder on every dashboard refresh, so
that is still deliberately avoided.

Continuous streaming

New Stream continuously mode for feeders on permanent power, via USB-C.
The session stays up instead of stopping after the auto-off timer, ready for Frigate or
any other recorder.

Not literally around the clock, though. The feeder decides when it is available:
it enters DEEP_SLEEP after dark regardless of how it is powered, and can also
report OFFLINE, OFF_GRID or a firmware update. The integration reads that
state and waits quietly rather than retrying a stream that cannot start, then
picks up again by itself once the feeder is back. Expect a nightly gap in your
recordings, and configure your recorder to tolerate a camera that disappears.

Bird Buddy records no postcards while the feeder streams. That trade-off is
inherent to the feeder, not to this integration. Most people running this replace
them with Frigate’s or other 3rd party detection anyway.

New entities

  • Livestream status sensor: idle, waking, warming up, streaming, asleep or
    error, with the raw feeder state in its detail attribute
  • Prepare livestream button, which wakes the feeder ahead of time for
    automations that want it ready before anyone looks

Reliability

  • The go2rtc source is now replaced with PATCH rather than PUT. PUT appends
    another source to an existing stream, so every placeholder and expired
    Kinesis URL stayed behind; go2rtc kept retrying all of them, filling its log
    with 403 Forbidden, and kept feeding viewers from the first source that
    still worked
  • A stalled teardown that left the keepalive running is fixed. The feeder used
    to keep streaming after auto-off until its battery ran down; the session is
    now released first and every teardown step is bounded by a timeout
  • The stream worker is revived on every path that replaces the go2rtc source,
    not just the initial swap, so the picture returns after an expired URL is
    refreshed
  • The camera card refreshes immediately instead of showing a stale image until
    Home Assistant restarted
  • Requires pybirdbuddy 0.0.21 or newer

Known limitation

Some browser players stop rendering after a while, with the timeline still
running, and need a page refresh. The stream itself keeps going; clicking again
after a refresh shows it immediately. Continuous mode avoids the source switch
that most often triggers this.

1.0.1

  • Park the go2rtc stream when a session ends, so an expired Kinesis URL no
    longer produces repeated 403 Forbidden errors in the go2rtc log
  • Report a rejected sign-in as invalid credentials instead of raising a
    KeyError

1.0.0

Initial release.

  • Camera entity exposing the Bird Buddy livestream
  • Session handling: start, poll, keepalive, stop, cooldown
  • Waits for the HLS playlist to run before releasing the stream URL
  • Session startup runs in the background, within Home Assistant’s 10 s limit
  • Auto-off timer to protect the battery
  • Optional go2rtc integration with HEVC to H.264 transcoding
  • English and Dutch translations