My Nest Cam Solution After Works With Nest Shutdown (1 gotcha)

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1

What this is:
Displaying a live Nest Camera stream in Lovelace UI after the Works With Nest program has been closed.

image

Gotcha:
You will have to share your camera publicly. I want to do further testing with the password option, but I have a feeling it won’t work.

What we don’t get:
Motion, person, sound detection.
Nest Mode control.

What happened?
I had Nest integrated, and I had the camera entity displayed on my Lovelace, I was happy I got in before Works With Nest shut down.
Then one day my HASSIO VM just died, the virtual disk was just gone.
I restored my last snapshot and began picking up the pieces but noticed my Nest integration wasn’t working quite as expected.
So I figured I’d remove the Nest integration and then re-add it. I assumed since I was in before the date my access was secured, I assumed wrong.

I had been digging around a lot and finally found a way to get the public stream Nest spits out into HA.
Then I also found out you can have a live stream in Lovelace! That’s what I always wanted it to be, so this is even better in my opinion than the true Nest integration as far as video, because the true Nest integration only gave an image every few seconds.

First we need to extract the stream URL out of the public webpage Nest spins up. There’s a utility here to do it, just paste in your public stream and the iSpy (think of it as open source Blue Iris, I was about to use this and still might to do image processing) will spit out the stream URL.

https://www.ispyconnect.com/userguide-nest.aspx

Here’s the configuration.yaml

camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: Front Door Camera
    input: https://stream-uc2-delta(might be different than delta).dropcam.com:443/nexus_aac/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/chunklist_wXXXXXXXXXXX.m3u8?public=XXXXXXXXXXX

For the Lovelace, I use a picture-glance card in case I want to interact with things that are visible in the camera view, like lights… I wish you could display sensor values here, I think water detection might work, because it just shows the entity icon.

Here’s the Lovelace config:

title: Front Yard
camera_view: live
type: picture-glance
camera_image: camera.front_door_camera
entities:
  - light.front_porch_light
  - switch.front_yard_holiday_lights_he

Hopefully this helps somebody else who feels left in the dark after Nest shut the door.
I’d love to hear suggestions about how to make this more secure, I’ll try the option with a password later.

5 Likes
2

An update, I don’t believe the password will work, there is no username to speak of generated by the sharing mechanism.

I tried the following:

camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: Front Door Camera
    input: https://stream-uc2-delta(might be different than delta).dropcam.com:443/nexus_aac/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/chunklist_wXXXXXXXXXXX.m3u8?public=XXXXXXXXXXX
    password: !secret

It’s not an RTSP stream so I don’t think I can do rtsp://pass@URL

If anyone paying attention has any ideas let me know.
For now it isn’t possible in my mind.

3

i wanted to say i saw a homebridge plugin not to long ago that might be of interest to you. m not the most knowledgeable on this but have been searching for months on how to get nest cams in my lovelace.

1 Like
4

I actually got nest cam “working” with homebridge a while ago but it was in my Pie and seemed rather choppy. I tried it again since I got homebridge working on my hassio docket and it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I used the same authorization config so I thought I’d be grandfathered in with works with nest, but I guess not.

5

Why not using the embed solution with iframe card ?

6

By the embed solution do you mean the old works with nest integration or the shared camera webpage?

I actually tried to make an iframe card with the shared camera page and it wouldn’t load the video element.

7

Hi,
The url I took from the nest.com - I shared my camera to public.
Then with iframe card I just copied the url.
type: iframe
url: https://nest.com/…
aspect_ratio: 75%

1 Like
8

When I do so I get a blank iFrame:

image
image994×482 13.6 KB

9

Without password I assume…
Can you use this link in a standard browser - in other pc ?

10

Correct no password unfortunately.
The web page works on every browser on PC.
Haven’t tested on mobile.

11

I logged in just to say thank you. I cleaned up three cards from my UI by being able to put them as entity buttons on the bottom of this camera glance card using the nest hello… thanks for sharing. Although I have to say, this one kinda sucks (not your fault) because the iFrame shows almost real-time footage whereas there is about 10 seconds of delay on this one. Google sucks.

1 Like
12

Yea the delay is a bummer.
I also tried badnest which got me some things like motion detection, I can’t remember if it got me person detection.
I was able to salvage my Nest Integration tokens from an old backup so I have almost instant person detection back.
I fear the impending 2 factor authentication might break the legacy Works With Nest that I’ve got working again.

We’ll see. I think we’ll continue to see hacky ways to get Nest into systems because so many people have it.
Google will drag their heals on the local Sandbox API I’m sure.

13

Got this working today really easily based on your instructions – thanks!

Definitely noticing the big delay, but it’s still nice to have something there. Fingers crossed we’ll see some new/better hacky ways of getting a more live stream, and/or Google come to their senses and release a new API.

1 Like
14

Glad to hear. Honestly I dropped this when I switched to my new Home Assistant OS install.
I use Bad Nest now, yes it’s not true video, it’s just snapshots, but the images come fast enough that if somebody is walking up my porch I see them in time. The true video did look nice though, too bad it was too old to be helpful.
Hoping we get a nice power user Sandbox API like the promised soon.

1 Like