Cameras In Home Assistant

Am I being stupid or are cameras just not an easy task for home assistant?

Basically my aim was to have 1 single camera feed into home assistant to give me a high quality image at a decent frame rate with as little lag as possible

So I’ve bought a couple cameras off Amazon that support ONVIF thinking that would be the way but just ran into problems

First camera wouldn’t work with ONVIF and RTSP streams were slow so tried a second camera, RTSP streams still slow and ONVIF works but for some reason only pulls the low resolution feed and its also very slow with a lot of lag/delay

I have an RTSP link that when opened in tinycam on my phone is extremely fast and works extremely well but no matter what I do I cant add this to home assistant and get the same results. Laggy as hell, massive delays and quality issues.

Am I being stupid? Do I just need a better camera to achieve this?

As a workaround at the moment I’ve got tinycam pro running on android, it has the RTSP feed and it then acting as a webserver and giving me an mjpeg URL which seems to work relatively well…

Ideal scenario would be a camera with at least 1080p, ONVIF support to give me PTZ in home assistant with a high quality and high frame rate video with as little to no lag as possible without having to run any type of camera software/server. Is this even possible?

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HA can’t work well with IP camera. Try other third party add on like motioneye.

I did give the motioneye addon a go but it just shot my CPU usage through the roof on my Pi that runs home assistant

I just listened to the most recent HA podcast and learned about this addon :


You mentioned motioneye but did not talk about object detection which is frigate aim. So I maybe down the wrong path. That said, if object detection is of interest, frigate can use the Google Coral USB AI accelerator. I am using this Coral device with some other video object software finding it pretty amazing for cost, very little impact on host cpu. I am going to need most of a bottle of wine to get through frigates configuration options, but it looks like a nicely done project. Good hunting

Doods is also good

With doods I sample image every 1-5 seconds on (8) cameras. I prefer this to video capture by motion detection.

Thanks for the reply’s but unfortunately I’m not interested in motion detection or anything like that I just need a working live watchable stream in lovelace…

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@liamstears Have you found a solution? I got ONVIF working and can live with the small image size, but only updating every 10 seconds is inadequate. I’m new to Home Assistant, so I’m not sure if the issue is the ONVIF module or the dashboard.

For anyone else searching, the solution is to take control of the dashboard in lovelace, edit the card for the camera, and set “Camera View (Optional)” to auto.