Being able to see what is going in a home is a significant part of home automation. Having that visibility is a common use case, but difficult to setup with Home Assistant.
Currently this can be done through various methods including the stream component, however It really should be a Lovelace card that can point to a rtsp URL. I understand that we do not want cards for everything, but this seems a much more reasonable default that a “humidifier card”.
Yeah!! What the heck!
Umm… there is. Picture-entity does it.
eg:
aspect_ratio: 56%
camera_image: camera.driveway
camera_view: live
double_tap_action:
action: call-service
service: camera.snapshot
service_data:
entity_id: camera.driveway_ff
filename: >-
/config/www/camera_snapshots/driveway-{{ now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S")
}}.jpg
entity: camera.driveway
show_name: false
show_state: false
type: picture-entity
The above is one of my cards which does give a live video feed, with the added perk of snapshots with a double-tap.
Sure, the card itself doesn’t have the rtsp URL, but does that really matter? It’s coded in the camera setup.
Thanks for the reply sparkydave, and I wish it was that easy. I have the ubiquiti camera system and can not connect to them directly or pull jpg’s directly.
Way back when I was considering Ubiquiti cameras I did read that you can log into them and enable RTSP streaming. Have you done that?
Yes, I have RTSP enabled on the cameras, and I have them working through the stream element. As mentioned in the post:
“Currently this can be done through various methods including the stream component, however It really should be a Lovelace card that can point to a rtsp URL.”
My point is this is a very common use case that should have a Lovelace card, and not require going to YAML.
Another missing feature of using the picture element card is it doesn’t show the camera feed(at least with rtsp) on the Overview page, you have to click on it first.
HA! Of course after posting I just figured out how to enable a live view
care to share?
It’s in my post above
camera_view: live
I wish I could say I read the instructions, instead I just noticed that the picture entity card has been updated with a “Camera view” option. Interestingly to me the default is “auto” which as far as I can tell, doesn’t do anything.
Generic IP camera setup via the UI - PR is in progress.
Does not directly create a UI card for lovelace, but helps set up of the camera which can then be added as a card (still or stream).
I would also recommend that anyone needing this gives the ONVIF integration a try first, because this may detect your camera and all sensors automatically.
This thread confuses the creation of a camera entity (or indeed any entity) with the depiction of that entity in a UI.