Alexa shows “waiting for Home assistant” and then closes
other actions via HA/Alexa work fine, like light control etc.
Does it start in 5 seconds when you try with a normal browser? Alexa would wait up to 5 seconds max.
which URL would i use to test? the nabu casu remote ui one?
looks like it can take over 5s to get going, i guess that’s the camera’s issue i need to fix?
I mean when you use home assistant over browser or mobile app, how long does it take to start the streaming? If it is more than 5 seconds, Alexa/google home would definitely fail and timeout
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OK, made some changes and the camera stream loads near instantly in browser, but Alexa/Show behaviour is the same. I don’t even see any activity in HA debug logs when making the alexa request so not sure where to look next
Can you enable preload stream option inside home assistant through browser and try again? This will keep the stream always on in background, so it should load it immediately.
i have, which made it load immediately in the frontend but still not working in Alexa
i have found the right debug logging to turn on, and can see the m3u8 that nabucasa is generating to the stream - if i load the m3u8 in VLC on the same PC that the frontend has preload on and the stream playing, i still see very slow loading in VLC. i’m going to spend some more time digging into the streams being put in the m3u8 and see what’s going on
Actually, it is my mistake, enabling preload just make it faster internal to home assistant, not for external callers.
So, given VLC is starting up slow, it is same for any external callers, so preload would not help here.
I spoke to Nabu Casa, who said
It sounds like this might be a bandwidth issue. The service only has about 6mbps to offer per user and is not ideal for streaming media. Can you test by temporarily lowering the quality / resolution for the camera streams?
After exposing my camera’s substream to Alexa, it now works.