WTH?! Are there no tools to diagnose webcams randomly cut out on the companion app?

[HAuserSince2019]

Is this really toroughly tested?

When setting my 4 camera’s to “live” in my dashboard. The randomly stop by giving no image (black), freezeframes or green. This happens Netatmo, Hikvision Onvif and sometimes also with unify. Everything is hardwired, 10G network, the right snooping and multicast setting etc. Using a POE tablet with Android 13. And MacOS companion app streams appear “white” when setting them to live.

So, and here is the question: why is there no option in Home Assistant that warns me about camera issues, I have no tools to diagnose the dashboard video losing it’s stream and doesn’t continue.

[FloatingBoater (James Derrick)]

Hi,

What are the chances the developers of the very recently released (2024.11) have test hardware and networking covering all of the cameras you mention (4x brands, each with different protocol support and some with controllers)?

I’d suggest heading over to GitHub to file detailed issue reports and ask the WebRTC devs for help. There will be HA debug options, browser logging, and WireShark network packet captures that together might show what is happening.

I’ve seem more issues with client-side support for WebRTC video than the much improved WebRTC peer-to-peer support.

Unify has options to choose the resolution of the stream to expose to HA - the Medium or Low option works much better across client devices as you’re not trying to instantly establish a 4k stream to a small, low-CPU, tablet.

If this helps, this post!

[WallyR (Wally)]

The chance is also there that it is not with HA, but the cameras.
HA can not detect anything wrong if there is a stream established, but no data is received.
It might be the camera that is not sending any data at the moment.

[HAuserSince2019]

That’s my point, why doesn’t HA tell me anything. I don’t know if the fail is an overload of the android tablet or not recieving data, when did it occur, any errorcode that could help…

[FloatingBoater (James Derrick)]

@HAuserSince2019

That’s my point, why doesn’t HA tell me anything.

It can, but you need to turn it on:

Logger

Here’s an untested configuration.yaml snippet based on previous BTLE hacking:

# Untested attempt at the camera componenet namespace based on:
# https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/7704ef95a43fa56a208c968e0ee4c8b99d4f3aa5/homeassistant/components/camera/webrtc.py
# https://youtu.be/m9gKFH8WlzY?t=3297                                                                                                                                                                             

service: logger.set_level
data:
  homeassistant.components.camera: debug
  homeassistant.components.camera.webrtc: debug


# Terminal
tail -f /config/home-assistant.log

Oh, and…

WTH isn't it easier to change an integration's log level

When you are having an issue with an integration, one of the more useful steps is to change it’s log level to debug. Users are often asked to do this and share the logs in issues but doing this may avoid the need to make an issue in the first place if the debug log shows what’s wrong. This can be done quickly and easily without a restart but it’s rather hidden. You have to know about the logger integration You have to find the info on the set level service and recognize that you can simply c…

[parautenbach (Pieter Rautenbach)]

There’s also a debug UI option for go2rtc specifically.

[HAuserSince2019]

Like the concept in putting it all in one server to make streams uniform and then output it to homeassistant dashboard. I see the go2rtc server is not yet in the official Add-on Store. But the dashboard integration is. I wonder what the re-encoding load would be for an RPi5 if the input bandwith is about 25Mbit/sec for 4 videostreams… maybe toomuch and easyer for a rpi5 to just forward the data…