Question about best way I should add my new Aqara G5 Pro POE cameras (2) to Home Assistant

Did you start with #1?

I also bought a G5Pro but the WIFI version, and i have a problem too. I am pretty new to HA and the whole Smarthome-thing, so forgive me if my questions are stupid in the beginning. I managed to get camera to work…wel kind of. In my dashboard i have a ā€œcamera viewā€ which is obviously broken,


How can i add a stream to my Dashbaord and not (in the best case) a picture? I can see the stream in the Aqara App working well. Thanks for your help.

Hey!
I have the camera connected to HomeKit and the Aqara App, It appears I managed to have connected the hub part of the camera to HomeKit and home assistant through matter (even though it says it’s unavailable in the matter integration).
I might be stupid but I can’t figure how to connect the camera itself to home assistant. Anyone has faced such issue and found out?

I add it HA from adding it to Scrypted with RTSP stream. Then use HomeKit Device integration to bring the camera directly to my HA dashboards

1 Like

There is an Aqara integration I think, but it was steering me towards Matter, which doesn’t have camera support yet, as I think a few above discovered. I bit the bullet and spent the last few days configuring Frigate, which is fantastic (but setting up frigate.yaml is a bitch). There’s both a frigate add-on (so you have to be on Supervised or HA OS) and a frigate integration; the latter exposes all the sensors and streams you need. It was able to pull in four different random cameras I had lying around, and it yields a professional looking page with all your cameras as low-res snapshots into which you can click for the beautiful high-res stream, especially from this camera. The CPU on my M2 mac mini host did not budge visibly (even without hardware acceleration because… UTM).

I also added the G5 Pro to HomeKit secure video because I wanted offsite video storage (too easy to steal the server, but Apple is the only one I trust), and so far that functions fine in parallel with Frigate. Weirdly, the camera is not wifi 802.11ax compatible, but it connected flawlessly to my 5 Ghz channel on -ac and miraculously is compatible with WPA3! It’s insane how few cameras aren’t compatible with modern encryption. After updating the firmware i denied the camera internet access and there have been no complaints from it; HKSV goes through your hub (an AppleTV in my case).

I do have a gripe, though, and it’s this: HomeKit presence detection seems to work off a 2d map and pretty much sucks. For instance: if I’m in the gym a few floors down, it thinks I’m home. I have ESPresence on small dev boards for bluetooth detection, and this is sharp as a tack and knows exactly when I’ve left; you can successfully send a binary_sensor with an occupancy class to HomeKit, but there’s no way I can find with shortcuts or automations to arm/disarm the HKSV camera. If someone knows a way around this, please let me know- it seems to be one of the few remaining walls in the garden.

You can of course use the Frigate side in HA and run them side by side- this doesn’t seem to overload either the camera or cause a network traffic problem in my instance.

is it possible to turn the camera on / off from HA ?

As above, not the HKSV side of it- it’s tied to the users phones.

Frigate is kind of always-on, but you can turn off the recordings.

I have been trying this from past few days
Can you please help me with this
I am trying to have the camera working in Frigate and enable continnous recording
I tested via VLC and RTSP works fine.
Camera is also added directly in HA and i can see the live view
But Frigate is giving the error
Error opening input files: Connection refused
Unable to read frames from ffmpeg process.
ffmpeg process is not running. exiting capture thread…

is it possible to turn off the recording and turn on the recording with this metod ? how ? I cant get it to work. I’ve sync it to matter in HA