Philips WelcomeEye

Feature Requests
3

Hello,

I have the same doorbell and I tried to find a way to integrate it to Home Assistant, but I believe it’s not something easy to do (or even feasible at this time).
I did several researches and tests, below some findings that might be interesting to share:

  1. The doorbell has no RTSP capabilities, hence it cannot be integrated using the generic camera integration.

  2. The app itself it’s quite old, it does not provide any integration capabilities with third party services, while this can be done with the Philips WelcomeEye Link.

  3. I tried to look into the application logs on both Android and iOS and I was able to find the local IP address of the camera. I tried to check if there were any open ports, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
    By checking the MAC address associated to that IP, the manufacturer associated to it seems to be “SHENZHEN BILIAN ELECTRONIC CO. ， LTD”.
    Something interesting about cameras produced by the same company can be found here, but I tried also the latest scripts and they doesn’t seem to work for me (probably the protocol is different).

  4. I tried to decompile the .apk of the Android app, to see if something useful could be found in the code.
    Apparently the latest versions have been obfuscated, but it is still possible to retrieve most of the source code by decompiling one of the old versions.
    From the source code, I was able to understand that the camera is based on a Chinese P2P protocol called Goolink (this is apparently their website).
    It seems like they have an SDK available, but I was not able to find it; the only thing you can find online is a documentation on GiHub (github .com/Goolink/documentation).
    I can confirm that the protocol is the same, because I was able to connect my phone to the Philips camera using the Goolink application.

  5. Since it’s not possible to find a Linux version of the SDK, I tried to write a simple Android app by reusing the .so libraries available retrieved from the decompiled .apk, and I was able to connect.
    I built a simple RTSP server on the app, to share the frames to Home Assistant using the generic camera integration, which seems to work but it has a lot of delay. In any case, it’s not really convenient as you would need to have an Android phone/emulator always on just to run this app and to allow HA to connect. On top of that, when the camera is “busy” because connected to your phone, the internal monitor will not work, so if someone rings the bell I believe you will not hear the chime from the internal device.

These are some of my findings, let me know if you want more details or if you see any other option that can be explored to integrate the doorbell to HA.

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