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Home Assistant as security camera PVR?? (piefed.ca)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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I've been running a very simple Home Assistant setup for a while now - just a few lights and a door lock. I've added a bit of monitoring and data gathering basically to see how MQTT works.

I installed a Reolink camera intending to setup Frigate PVR and do all the good stuff (including more cameras) with that, but my hardware is old and I need a TPU and they're all out of stock and back ordered until October, at best. I've tried ZoneMinder but couldn't get over all the false positives with fog and rain etc. So, I had given up on my camera project for a while.

Then I installed the Reolink integration in Home Assistant and see that it has basic "AI" capability and I can trigger automations based on "person seen" etc. I already created a basic "save 30 seconds of video if you see a person". I've got pretty basic requirements and can probably be happy with a few more basic automations like this, but this seems almost a waste - there is so much capability there. I had a bit of a look in the internal integrations repository and HACS and I can't see anything that looks like a PVR.

Does it exist?

Is it something I shouldn't be trying to do with Home Assistant? There was no noticeable increase in CPU usage when I enabled my test automation so I assume the "AI" is happening in the camera. I don't see a downside??

Edit - I've continued working and reading more about the Reolink Integration and now partially answer my own question: I think I'm going to be happy with just the Reolink integration and some automations. It seems to work very well!

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[–] SteveTech@programming.dev 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I know this seems pretty much solved, but I just wanted to point out:

Frigate doesn't need a TPU, OpenVINO is quite performant even on decade old Haswells, or if you've got a GTX 750 or higher you might be able to use that as well.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 1 points 15 hours ago

I said my hardware was old and I meant it :-)

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz

I just don't see any reason to upgrade - I feel it's doing a lot for me and spends almost all the time at least 90% idle. It was nearer to 98% until I enabled Reolink on my Home Assistant VM - I'm running the highest quality stream from the camera, just to see how it performs.

[–] realitista@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think you can do much past just display the live (usually somewhat delayed) camera feeds. If you have some external object detection, you could probably feed the detection events to Frigate. That would make it as efficient as anything you could do natively in HA.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Installed the WebRTC component from HACS and the cameras are less than 3 seconds delayed for me

[–] realitista@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah webrtc is one of the best in this regard. Unfortunately I can't display 4 of them on my kiosk tablet.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I’ve never done this solely with HA

I will say for my experience blue iris outperforms all competition to the point that I use it over non free software, which I always try to prioritize. Zoneminder is nice but blue iris just works better

I also use reolink Poe cameras, the HA layer is mainly to retain reolink notifications and remote access

Should be possible though. I would suggest HA forums

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

Zoneminder is awful. HA has Frigate and its 1000x better than Zoneminder and probably on par with BlueIris. Get it in the Add-On store.

[–] realitista@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But is Blue Iris really worth dealing with Windows over? I think Frigate has pretty much caught up by now and is developing quickly.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

I would have to evaluate frigate again to say, dunno and it’s been years since I’ve checked. I just have a vm for blue iris that’s solely for blue iris. It’s not the end of the world (though I wouldn’t mind getting rid of it)

There is a docker version but it runs poorly

You’ve inspired me to reevaluate though. If I can kill a windows VM then it’s a good thing.

[–] OminousOrange@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

I've got a similar setup. BlueIris is my NVR but I have the reolink integration on HA to trigger alert notifications that include a screenshot and activate lights at night upon detection. Only downside is that BlueIris is Windows only.

OP, I also think it's probably doable with automations if you're fine without full time recording (suppose you could throw an SD card in the cams for that), but some data management automations that delete clips older than x days are probably good too.

[–] Godnroc@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

MotionEye may be worth looking into further. There is an add-on for it. I have used to before on a raspberry Pi to steam video of the washer in the basement so that I could know if it was done from the second floor.