A little off topic, but I purchased a Starling Home Hub assuming I could add it to Home Assistant via Homekit Controller to get around the terrible Nest integration (API rate limits, newest doorbell support, floodlight controls) and be able to view the feeds in Home Assistant. Is that not possible? Currently it looks like I only get snapshots for the camera entity. I emailed Starling Home to ask for some insight and they had this to say:
Hi cayce7,
Thanks for reaching out! While we don’t officially support Home Assistant, we do have customers using our hub with HA + HomeKit Controller, so we can give you some general pointers.
We understand that HomeKit Controller only supports certain types of devices, and that in particular the support for cameras is very limited (snapshots but no live video). This seems to match what you’re experiencing. We’re not sure if there are any workarounds for this – there is no technical reason why HomeKit Controller shouldn’t be able to bring HomeKit cameras into HA – so we would suggest reaching out to the Home Assistant / HomeKit Controller community and asking about this. (There isn’t really anything specific to Starling Home Hub here – it’s no different to any other HomeKit camera – so if other HomeKit cameras work, so should Nest cameras via Starling Home Hub – but also vice versa.)
The best approach for Home Assistant integration would be for someone in the HA community to develop an add-on that talks to our Starling Developer Connect API. We don’t have the knowledge or resource to spearhead this internally, however, if there is someone within the community that is willing to lead this, we would be very happy to offer (free of charge) engineering and support time to get it done, as we are sure there is quite a lot of demand for this.
-Adrian
So my questions are:
- Do normal HomeKit cameras play streams in Home Assistant?
- Does anyone know who would be willing/able to create an addon/integration to support Starling’s API, with the help of Starling?
- Is there any current discussion or a better place to ask about video support in HomeKit Controller? (I’ve searched high and low, but there isn’t anything recent, 2020, 2021 and early 2022 is the latest I was able to find.
I am fairly new to Home Assistant, so apologies if this has been asked already.