I have my first Reolink camera (CX810) integrated into Home Assistant, and so far it is working well, a very easy setup. But I am struggling to understand what the integration does in HA and in the camera.
Reolink firmware is up to date
In the Media tab in HA I now have a Reolink button that takes me to a link for my camera that opens into a folder per day which contains media clips for each piece of motion captured.
My questions are: where are these files located , are they downloaded to my HA device (and do I need to manage space on that device)
Or are they links to what is on the camera?
Secondly when i try and play these clips nothing happens I just get an empty media player box with greyed controls. I can go to the Reolink app and play the files there so I know they exist, but is there something I need to do to get them to play in HA?
Also have the same questions, I feel like these are on the sd card as I can play them on my pc but not on mobile data, also the 3 cameras missing sd cards are not showing there.
At this point I think there is no way to have the media in home assistant, I’ve been spoiled by the scrypted nvr addon.
Likely I’m going to create a card link to the reolink app for viewing events and using the surveillance card for live view.
Locally I think I can make a web frame to the nvr address but away from home will need to be the reolink app I think
Yes I agree Suzy, after using it for a week the data must be on the SD card.
It is available to play via the media tab in HA but strangely this can be quite intermittent, sometimes it plays and other times its just greyed, this is on PC and on mobile (browser not app).
The images/videos you see under media browser are really. a link in your HD card… They do not work in many occasions because of the SSL error. Temporarily you could fix this by visiting the camera IP from the same device and accept the SSL error.
You could potentially overcome this by running an NGINX proxy and passthrough the traffic and ignoring SSL from there onwards.
But this may potentially break your camera integration when you use RTMB protocol. Because NGINX out of the box does not support this RTMP protocol, you need to configure RTMP module.
The reolink integration merely show the links to these files and let the browser access these media. So if you are away from your local network this might break the connectivity.
There is no easy way to sync (aka backing up your SD card in your home assistant storage).
If the integration let the HA to act as proxy and stream the media through HA (rather than letting the browser connect directly to camera) this may resolve this issue, but this might add a bit of latency, but again you are accessing the old footage, so this is not a problem.
You could choose to record 24x7 to a FTP location and map that FTP as a media storage in HomeAssistant and access your file without issues. but this is not everyone’s cup of tea.