Will a POE switch decrease the delay for my cameras to load / stream

Hardware
1

I am fairly new to HA, but am fairly happy with my setup (mainly for displaying cameras and pop-ups from motion on wall mounted tablets). The streams are really delayed and not really useful in a “live” scenario (using reolink integration).

I have a reolink cctv system with nvr and explored webrtc, and subsequently frigate/gotortc with webtortc not being supported anymore, and got completely lost down a rabbit hole with it requiring more code knowledge than I have.

My question is whether using a POE switch instead would increase the speed that my camera streams load on HA, as the NVR upload may be causing the delay? Thanks

2

Short answer is no. It won’t. Livestreams are simply too delayed to be even useable.
Especially for a doorbell or camera with motion detection.
I use Fully Kiosk on an Android tablet and remotely start an app on the Android tablet (sort of Android intents). In your case you could load the Reolink app to start and show the desired streams without any delay. Home Assistant is there in this case to take care the automation.

1 Like
3

Thanks for that. I also use fully kiosk. I think I would be capable of getting it to load the reolink app on my android tab, but not on navigating it automatically to the correct camera feed.

I will have a little look deeper into it

4

I have several poe 4k ipcams and they all are tied to frigate, using the 4k stream and mpeg4, and then streamed to the ha android app. Delay is around a second from selecting that view and having a live feed. This isn’t on super fast hardware either, all running on an old i7-6700k. So it’s possible to get what you want without using third party apps.

1 Like
5

I’m guessing my HA green is nowhere near good enough, as the frigate add on was showing 90% CPU usage. I followed this guide to the T: https://youtu.be/upXyBVMR4RM and it just wouldn’t load up the stream, only display the thumbnail.

1 Like
6

That would make sense, I don’t think any of the low power rpi like devices are going to be able to keep up.

1 Like
7

There will always be a slight delay in a live feed due to the need for it to capture then send to the screen you are viewing from.

I use a hikvision and hilook onvif camera at the moment that are going through a 5 port tp-link POE switch then into my main 24 port hpe switch in my rack and one hilook that is going via a POE injector then into mesh node that conects via 5Ghz backbone to the main router that feeds into my synology nas I am using as my NVR. (internet side access is blocked for the camera’s specifically)

I have HA use a shelly button 1 via an automation to capture an image the moment it is pressed as a doorbell action and send it to my phone via notification for the front door camera whilst the main feeds I view view DS Cam (I use openvpn via my router on the phone to connect to it for near live feeds when I am out especially when I am on a 5G connection at the time.)

I run my HA instance on a Intel NUC5i7RYH in a passive cooled case in a virtualbox instance currently with little to no issues other than my BT dongles being dead for passthrough.

image
image736×671 110 KB

image
image1609×587 24.6 KB

edit: added more info for reference for those looking to setup similar to mine if they are having issues with pi’s etc

8

I have 3 reolink cameras running through frigate using go2rtc. My system is an i7 with a coral tpu, docker for frigate and HA. The delay is more than acceptable at around 1 second.

2 Likes
9

depends what you are using to display that live stream. If you are using HA’s default HLS then yes it is delayed by multiple seconds. If you use webrtc then the delay is milliseconds and perfectly usable

10

You are right! I was referring to the support out of the box Home Assistant brings.

1 Like