How many RTSP cameras are you running in Home Assistant?

Third party integrations
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1

I'm slowly adding more cameras and was wondering how well Home Assistant scales.

For those running 10+ cameras:

Do you stream continuously?
Only on demand?
Separate recording from HA?

Just looking for ideas before I expand my setup.

2

FYI: My setup.

  • 7 outdoor POE Reolink cameras dual RTSP streams to my Blueiris server.
  • 2 indoor wifi cameras, single RTSP stream to Blueiris. Only powered on when house is empty.
  • All these cameras setup as MJPG IP Cameras using low-res stream for casual Home Assistant dashboard.
  • Blueiris, with it's built-in AI, is doing all the object detection & recording. It communicates with HA via MQTT for driving my security automations etc.
  • I also do have the Reolink integration setup but only enabled the low-res streams. Not really leveraging the Reolink integration for anything.
  • My HA system is an older i3 Intel NUC with 32GB RAM & 256GB SSD.

No performance issues for me at all.

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Nick

3

Five Tapo C210 cameras, one C211, two C110, one C320WS, one TC40 and an H200 hub & D230 doorbell. Some of them are at my partner's house accessed via WireGuard VPN over my VDSL & her FTTP. HA is running HAOS bare-metal on a refurbished Dell Optiplex 3020M with 16GiB RAM, a SATA SSD & 3GHz Intel Core i5-4570T.

I use the HACS Tapo: Camera Control integration for these as it's more fully-featured than the TP-Link Smart Home one.

But I disable the camera entities and pull the RTSP streams via a local systemd-based go2rtc service running on the file servers at each site then create Generic Camera entities pointing to those servers and also use HACS WebRTC cards and FFmpeg-based video recorder systemd services, also pointed at the go2rtc instances not the actual cameras..

That way the cameras are only ever streaming to one client - the CPUs & wifi on budget cameras like these aren't really cut out for multiple clients.

I have an overview dashboard using WebRTC cards to show all the cameras at once.

All runs very smoothly even with the dashboard open on multiple PCs & Android devices.

Have been thinking of installing a Frigate server somewhere using a Google Coral. Will take a look at Blueiris as well (thanks @nickh66).

4

On what hardware is your Blue Iris running?