I am brand new to the whole audio/video surveillance side of home assistant and was hoping I could get some suggestions for where to start. I have some very basic criteria:
-3 to 4 cameras (2 “ring” style door bell cameras for front and back door, 1 living room and one hall way room view camera)
-2 way audio
-mobile camera view ability when streaming.
-ability to automate the above (ideally it would be something like “if my wife, myself, or both are home, disable streaming(not local recording, keep that going). but if we are gone, enable streaming.”
Ok, let’s talk about video surveillance (as opposed to the kind of home security system that has motion and door sensors and keypads and alarms). It’s kind of a mess.
There is no industry standard in Home Automation / Video Surveillance right now that gives you all the features you’re looking for (with the possible exception of HomeKit, see below). This means you will basically have to carefully research everything and make sure they support enough interoperability features. Some to look for include:
- On-board recording to SD card with on/off switch — recording on-board means you only have to stream when viewing the camera, which makes it far easier to deploy multiple WiFi cameras on legacy networks. Without this, you’ll need to either run Cat6 cable everywhere, or upgrade your network to WiFi 6 with 5Ghz cameras, and invest in a NVR with storage.
- On-board motion detection — similarly on-board AI detection means you don’t have to stream everything 24/7 to a NVR and you don’t have to invest in hardware like Google Coral that can analyze multiple streams in realtime for motion events.
- ONVIF support for access to sensors and streams — this is one of few (and sadly, rare) camera standards you will see, but does not provide access to camera control, like turning recording on and off if you don’t want to be constantly recorded. For that you need…
- Custom HA integration for access to switches and controls — “unlocks” all the native (and proprietary) functionality of the camera. If HA doesn’t ship with an integration for your camera, you can also check the HACS community repository.
- Secure remote access and storage is huge concern — many cheap cameras offer cloud streaming/storage, but a few have been caught accidentally streaming strangers’ cameras to unauthorized users, so I keep my cameras off the internet. The “HA Native” solution for this is to subscribe to Nabu Casa’s HA Cloud service, which provides remote streaming but no storage for $6.50/mo; if you have Apple iPhones and Home Hub you can also use that for secure remote access (and storage with iCloud+ $2.99/mo).
Apple HomeKit (the protocol) has pretty good camera support, but of course it requires you to be fully invested in Apple Home ecosystem, which is separate from HA. After 2-1/2 years of the new(ish) Matter protocol, there is still no support for anything camera or video-related, so I suspect it is turning out to be a harder problem than they anticipated, but hopefully someday will bring full camera support to Home Assistant.
Personally I use several cheap Tapo cams and the Tapo Camera Control HACS integration. I keep on-demand streaming enabled, but only record on-board when my alarm system is armed home/away (I’m not trying to be Fort Knox over here). I use a Scrypted server to bridge them to HomeKit for remote access and HKSV (secure video / facial recognition / offsite storage). It’s not ideal, but it is sufficient for now and cost under $150 in total.
Final note about two-way audio, it’s not a feature I use and a quick search suggests it isn’t natively supported by HA yet, but perhaps others can weigh in on their experiences.
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Thank you for all of this information!
It seems I have quite a bit more research to do.