HIKVision Camera & NVR support

[Vaughanza (Vaughan Lundin)]

Hi Guys
I would like to buy some HIKVISION cameras for outside my home and add them to HA. Does HA support them nicely etc. Will it be a major issue to add them to my HA.

Thanks
Vaughan

[Harry13 (George Georgas)]

Its in the integrations

[Vaughanza (Vaughan Lundin)]

Thanks George I did see that , what I was wonder it they work well with HA

[Harry13 (George Georgas)]

Well i install Hik’s for my clients. But at my place i installed a reolink only cause im cheap . I dont regret the camera. Just the NVR. From the Docs the binary sensor will give you everything you need. If you want Camera feeds you will have to setup either as rstp, or onvif or use motion eye addon.

[truglodite]

I use blueiris, but if your hik’s have a webserver available you can use this info maybe to get it done:

Blue Iris Integration Tutorial

Summary I’ve seen multiple requests on the forum and Reddit regarding camera integration with Home Assistant. Most of them appear to be outside of the scope of what can reasonably be accomplished, e.g. using HA as a central point of monitoring for motion detection. As someone that’s used BI and has multiple PoE cameras around the house, I figured I’d share my setup. BI acts as the “brain” to the cameras and offers a massive amount of customization around detection, alerting, storage, etc. I don…

I use the picture card with blue iris, and it is very efficient (no noticeable increase in htop on either BI pc or the ha pi). Just FYI if you run HA on a pi, you definitely don’t want to try and make it an NVR… use it just for viewing only, no recording or processing. Using mqtt for motion alerts is fine, but processing hd video is best left to a dedicated nvr or pc, or better yet the camera itself (I love dahua IVS for that reason).

[Harry13 (George Georgas)]

but a HIK vision NVR is far cheaper than a WIndows PC with BI, sure the BI will do everything, but then you have the windows updates, etc to worry about than you do with a dedicated NVR.
but the HIK NVR is a well laid out NVR with heaps of features compare to the disappointing Reolink NVR i have, camera’s great NVR not so great. HIK camera’s great, NVR great.

[truglodite]

True, and on top of being cheaper you can find NVR’s that have a POE switch built in. That makes an ipcam install about as clean and simple as it gets… just one box in the closet with cat5/6 running to each cam and that’s it.

The main caveat with dvr’s is a lot of folks like to use the built in apps they come with for remote access, forwarding ports etc, which exposes their cams… and plenty of available dvr’s these days (cams included here) like to phone home to CN. Thanks to an app and ‘simple port forwarding’ howto’s, a dvr makes it too easy for folks to screw up on securing their cameras. OTOH, either way even with blue iris you still have to make sure your cameras can’t phone home. The windows updates are optional BTW… with the BI pc having no outside access (local or vpn only), there’s no reason to keep updates turned on or worry much about them.

[Harry13 (George Georgas)]

Well not true, blue iris will releaae updates based on changes made to windows, and so your going to need to update both.

[truglodite]

Ah that would be a problem for some I guess… not for me since I didn’t renew my support with BI and I’ve been on the same version for over a year. The BI updates are only available if you have an active support account.