Reolink Camera: snapshots too delayed after motion detection

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Hello!

I have a few battery-powered Reolink cameras around my property, linked with the Home Hub. I’m trying to set them up to send me a snapshot when motion is detected. This works, though the snapshot action seems to be delayed. Most of the time, the image I receive is around 10s after the motion event - it’s often too late to see what may have triggered the motion.

My theory is that the cameras are busy recording the event, and take the snapshot after they are done.

Currently I have set up the recording inside the Reolink app and set the schedule to be detecting 24/7. Then I use the PIR switch entity inside HA to turn on and off the cameras based on a schedule I have set up using scripts in HA. I wanted to change this to allow HA to also control the recordings - create a script that, when motion is detected, it takes a snapshot and turns on manual record for 20s. I hoped this would solve the delayed snapshots issue. Unfortunately it seems that the cameras do not do motion detection when the ‘enable record’ switch in the Reolink app is turned off.

Does anyone have a way of getting the battery-powered cameras to take a snapshot before a recording? Or am I being an idiot - can HA take a snapshot at the same time as the cameras are recording?

Thanks!

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I use a Reolink Duo 2 camera over a slow 900 MHz link to capture images of vehicles triggering a magnetic field sensor in my driveway.

The HASS snapshot capture works, but not reliably.

I used a script to fetch a snapshot via HTTP - it works very reliably, but requires more scripting.

Here’s info on the Reolink snapshot API, but it looks like it excludes battery cameras (mine is PoE from a large solar powered battery):

I can watch the camera live through the Reolink apps using the fluent stream, but I can’t watch or record through the RLN36 - the DVR keeps a high definition stream open at all times, and the RF link becomes completely saturated and unusable. The camera records continuous HD video to the SD card, but nothing works when a continuous HD stream is open.

I expect your hub is also opening and maintaining a continuous HD stream from the camera. I complained to Reolink about it more than a year ago, but nothing happened - perhaps you can write the same.