Static Image Hosting

Configuration
1

I understand that streaming live video (say, from an NVR such as BlueIris) doesn’t work well, especially through Nabu Casa when remote.

Instead, I’m thinking of just grabbing static images that are updated often by my BlueIris server.

I’m trying to think of the best way to do this considering I want my lovelace dashboard containing these images to work remotely via Nabu Casa as well.

I have BlueIris serving static images of my camera on a local web server as well as posting files to a filesystem. I suppose I could even use the Samba integration and post files directly to the Home Assistant file system.

Thoughts?

2

Use the generic camera integration to grab just the still image (the stream source is optional):

You should be able to get them directly from Blue Iris (though I don’t know for sure as I don’t use it).

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3

Thanks Tom. I’ve read about this, the Glance card, and a few others. I think the common issue with these is, if I give a URL to the webserver (an internal one), it will likely work fine when the user is on the LAN. However, when remote, that URL will be unavailable.

So I’m trying to figure out a way to get this done without punch holes in firewalls, etc.

4

If you can have Blue Iris save the images in config/www/my_images_whatever then use that path in the camera config it will be accessible externally.

You have to restart HA after creating the config/www folder if it does not exist.

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5

I wondered about this. I think I can get BI to do that (using the Samba integration maybe?).

So the “URL” in the Generic Camera, instead of http://mywebser.com/images/camera.jpg, would be something like: config/www/camimages/camera.jpg ?

I guess I didn’t realize the URL could be a local filesystem path. I will try this.

6

It would be, local/camimages/camera.jpg

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7

I have a pilot setup working (sort of: below).

I couldn’t get the local file to work. Perhaps I’m using the wrong syntax in the generic camera. But, on a whim, I pointed Generic Camera to a static image on the internal/LAN BlueIris web server which updates every 30 seconds.

The good news is it works (even remotely).

The bad news is I’m still getting poor-ish performance when remote. I’ve found that, even with just one camera on the dashboard, that Nabu bandwidth limitations seems to choke things up. (image doesn’t load, connectivity errors, etc)

This may be something I have to put on the shelf until a better method comes out. It’s funny, for all the trouble that Vera gives users, this is one thing that actually worked pretty well. (I’m a recent Vera convert.)