I have a Starling Home Hub and no Apple devices; I got it specifically to integrate my existing Nest Protects and Nest × Yale Lock into Home Assistant, but actually prefer its exposing of the Nest Thermostat over HomeKit to the official Nest integration as well. I’ve been very happy with it except when it comes to cameras, as the performance is just bad; laggy feeds, low framerate, frequently outdated, etc. which apparently is not uncommon with cameras in Home Assistant… but I digress.
I reached out to Starling to thank them for a great product, and to ask if they could provide any pointers for the Home Assistant community when it comes to integrating Nest cameras into Home Assistant via their hub. Here is what they (Adrian) had to say (emphases mine):
Starling Home Hub’s HomeKit video stream is pretty standard (HomeKit video requirements are very constrained, so all HomeKit streams from all cameras will use the same audio and video encoding protocols and parameters). If camera streaming works fine in ‘real’ HomeKit but you have issues with Home Assistant, then it’s definitely a Home Assistant-side issue (or maybe, more specifically, with HomeKit Controller for Home Assistant) and so unfortunately we’re not really able to help, as we don’t use / can’t support Home Assistant. We definitely think it’s worth reaching out to the Home Assistant community to see if there are any ideas there. We would expect that people would be having similar issues with ‘native’ HomeKit cameras since there really isn’t any difference between those, and the feeds from Starling Home Hub, in terms of the video stream format or data.
As an aside, we really do wish there was a ‘native’ Home Assistant add-on for Starling Home Hub that used the hub’s Developer Connect API, rather than going via HomeKit. It’s just one less ‘translation’ going on and there would be much more flexibility to make sure everything works perfectly, including cameras. We don’t have the resource to lead the development of such a thing ourselves, however, we would be more than happy to contribute engineering/test resource (free of charge) to assist with anyone in the community who wanted to develop such an add-on. If you hear anything, let us know.
I’ve taken a look at their SDC API and it seems pretty straightforward and stable (if I’m reading correctly, it was basically implemented to be similar to the deprecated “Works with Nest” API to make it easier for developers to adapt their integrations). Given that they’re at least open to collaborating (even if not explicitly leading the development), it sounds like it would be a worthwhile effort.
Unfortunately developing an integration from scratch is a bit beyond my UX-designer-and-occasionally-begrudgingly-front-end-dev skillset, but I would be more than happy to assist in testing and trying things out if someone wanted to take on the development. Any who knows, maybe I could learn a thing or two and contribute. 
