Multiple Amcrest Cameras

[jwadsley]

I have two Amcrest cameras that I would like to see a live feed of in HA

I have my configuration setup as below

amcrest:
  - host: "192.168.1.111"
    username: XXXXXX
    password: XXXXXX
    port: "8085"
    name: Porch
  - host: "192.168.1.110"
    username: XXXXXX
    password: XXXXXX
    port: "8080"
    name: Garage

When I have both, I get errors, but when I have only one camera in the configuration file, it works fine. What am I doing wrong?

[jwadsley]

Not sure why, but without changing anything it all suddenly started working with two cameras, just how I have it posted in the script above…

[jwadsley]

So I got the cameras to come up in the Dashbaord, however the response time is terrible, like over a minute if something passes in front of the camera until it shows up on the phone…this is on my home wifi network.

Is this normal? In other apps on my phone any movement is instantaneous…

[tmjpugh]

@jwadsley

Is this normal? In other apps on my phone any movement is instantaneous…

Yes it is

[jwadsley]

Why is it so much slower than a normal app? There can’t be that much processing to do vs a live stream…

[tmjpugh]

Mine aren’t 1 min. More like 30sec compared to 1-3aec from camera web view

Not sure why

[tmjpugh]

Take a look at this

I tried all the camera platforms so you don't have to

When I started with Home Assistant a couple years ago, one of the main use cases was making a nice dashboard which included my cameras. Unfortunately this simple desire has been far from easy to achieve. In my quest for something reliable and real time, I think I have now tried every option that is open to me and realized that none of them is really perfect, but I’ve learned enough that it’s at least worth sharing so that other people have some better idea of their options and which one might fi…

[jwadsley]

Thanks, that was very helpful. Did not even think about all of the other integration options. I used the ONVIR and got it down to like 8 seconds for a reaction.

I’m sure there are so many more things I could do with HA, but I don’t even know what those are…

[tmjpugh]

Also, if you have cameras you must look at Frigate

I tried Ubiquiti, motioneye, zoneminder, blueiris, shinobi and anything else you may consider. Frigate is easy to use and provides great review capabilities

[richt (Rich)]

I second taking a look at Frigate, however I caution that “easy to use” may not be the case for all users as much of the configuration is manually entered in YAML and the documentation and example configurations posted by some users may not be up to date with the most recent version. It may take a bit more effort to get started, however once you get the basics, getting good results is easier than some other apps. I’ve been able to get much better motion detection results from Frigate than the other apps I tried.