Camera support for HomeKit component

Feature Requests
55

Would you share your configuration please or more information? How can you run HomeKit and homebridge on the same device?

56

see earlier reply - each application runs in a separate docker container and share the host network, so use ‘–net host’ on the docker run command line when creating the container.

57

how would I install this on hassio?

58

You can not install this on Hassio, you install homebridge on docker. Homebridge has virtually nothing to do with HA or Hassio. It is a completely different system. Homebridge is like HA or OpenHAB, but specialized in Apple products.

If you know your way around Home Assistant a little I will advise you to completely ditch Homekit (except for Siri). I have a ton of reasons as to why you should move away from Homekit but obviously that is a personal preference. Good luck!

Edit: Home Assistant can look pretty much like Homekit does if you want it to:

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59

@jimz011, those are some impressive-looking screenshots! Is that your setup? Any chance there’s a way you could share the theme/lovelace code to get the tiles to show up like that?

60

Yes this is my production setup and Yes I can show you, however I will warn you it is not for beginners :joy:. (At least not yet, I will release an easier setup in the future).

Forum thread:

Github repo:

Everything needed to run this setup is on my repo. There are video’s as well, just keep in mind that the videos are two months old and That the setup has changed quite a bit (in terms of theming and optimizations)

61

Thank you! This is awesome.

62

@cdce8p Your contribution is amazing - thank you so much for your hard work, long hours, and effort. What you provided with your most recent updates works flawlessly - I can only imagine what this took to accomplish. Someone will pick up this integration and move it forward. I’ll dabble a bit and see if I can contribute in any way. No cameras…? Meh… This is still one of the best and cleanest integrations available for HA. Kudos to you @cdce8p

3 Likes
63

So, gave up waiting for hassio homekit camera support and yesterday set homebridge docker from here:

Executed with

-e PACKAGES=ffmpeg

added a sample camera config and vuala, all my cameras available in all my home apps across all ios devices (iphones, ipads, apple watch - that one I was really surprised) streaming live.

All together took not more than 10 minutes.

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2 Likes
64

For what it’s worth, I would also love to see Camera HomeKit support in Home Assistant!

1 Like
65

Hi Guys, tired of waiting but have a few ?

-Using homebridge, is it possible to get notifications I home app with movement detection?
-Even if we get a working camera support in HomeKit component, will it be possible to use iCloud storage för recordings etc?
-What specs does the camera need? I guess most will work but something to have in mind when buying?

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
66

  1. No not possible to get notifications

  2. No only for cameras apple supports

  3. If you can get the camera into home assistant with rtsp, it will work :slight_smile:

67

it is possible to get notification on motion detected with homebridge. check in wiki and look for motion:

motion enable a dummy switch and motion sensor to trigger picture notifications in iOS 13, defaults to false . See wiki for more detailed instructions.

1 Like
68

Ah sorry, hadn’t noticed that!

69

I don’t suppose anyone would be able to point me in the right direction for getting my 4 RTSP camera (hikvision) streams working in Homekit/Homebridge? I just got them working again on this new lovelace version of hassio using:

camera:
  - platform: generic
    name: Drive
    still_image_url: "http://<ip>/ISAPI/Streaming/channels/101/picture"
    stream_source: "rtsp://<un>:<pw>@<ip>/Streaming/Channels/102"
    username: "<un>"
    password: "<pw>"
    authentication: digest

camera 2:
  - platform: generic
    name: Garden
    still_image_url: "http://<ip>/ISAPI/Streaming/channels/101/picture"
    stream_source: "rtsp://<un>:<pw>@<ip>/Streaming/Channels/102"
    username: "<un>"
    password: "<pw>"
    authentication: digest

I can see lots of folks about posting about how they’ve dedicated a pi just for hombridge for the video streams. Is there any good beginner friendly guides on how to do this?

Desired outcome: Expose 4 RTSP video streams to homekit - via Home assistant.

70

@Iain_Attenborough

You cannot use HA to expose them to HomeKit. That’s the point in this thread. It’s people hoping support is added one day.

It’s a 2 step process.

  1. You use your above method to expose them to HA to see your cameras in HA only
  2. You setup a Homebridge server and configure cameras via HB to expose into HoneKit.

Happy New Years

1 Like
71

What plugin is best for homebridge to get RTSP cameras streaming to HomeKit? Would it be https://github.com/KhaosT/homebridge-camera-ffmpeg but was hoping for something to take the raw RTSP stream and not need ffmpeg as a dependency?

EDIT: All good, needed to add -e PACKAGE ffmpeg to the docker container and all worked.

72

Hey y’all, I’ve added camera support to the Home Assistant HomeKit integration and could use some feedback/testing. Here’s the PR and the docs. Let me know if you have any questions.

10 Likes
73

First, @xdissent, it’s SO AWESOME that you’ve done this - thank you! Second, I’m not sure exactly how to go about installing/testing…do I need to be on beta to test? I’m currently on 0.106.2.

74

I’m not sure how you installed home assistant, but the idea is to run my fork rather than your current version. It’s based on the latest dev branch so I can’t speak to the general stability or what it might do to an existing install. If you installed with pip, then according to the docs this command should get you there: pip3 install --upgrade git+git://github.com/xdissent/home-assistant.git@homekit-camera