What the best integration of CAMERA?

Discussion
#1

I got camera setup in HA, and show that in homehabit. This works quite good for most of the time. But very often the picture just won’t be refreshed. It’s only a single camera, so no big load for the network.

Is it better to directly stream from the camera? Or let motioneye reduce the stream in size?
What’s the best way to get a steady and stable updated picture?

camera:
#2

ANY update or advise on this topic? It’s totally unusable as it is!!!
The picture freezes after a few minutes/hours and will not be updated until you change pages or tap the picture to zoom it. Then it will reload.
NOT USEABLE as surveillance board (what it is supposed to be in my case)

HOW would I integrate a STABLE camera feed? Noone??

#3

@izeman can you upload debug logs from the Support screen?

#4

Just did twice. One old one, and than after I restarted the app, and a few minutes later there was no more camera update.

DeviceID b31928a6…

Thanks

#5

@igor you received what you need? Or should I send anything else. Thanks!

#6

@izeman yes, under investigation now. Will get back to you in a day or so.

1 Like
#7

I had the similar sort of issue and I used ffmpeg platform, which appeared on HH straight away but the it’s slow on the dashboard. It’s lagging behind over 12 sec. and very slow motioned.

#8

@Santanu_Das the lag might be coming from HA itself because of ffmpeg conversion, depending on the hardware

#9

hummm… the lag is hardly noticeable directly on the Lovelace and it’s doing actually better on ffmpeg platform, compared to others. Unfortunately on the HH, it’s hardly usable, really.

#10

I can confirm that. With ffmpeg the lag is massive. At least for the purpose of a door security camera, where you need to see what’s happening NOW :wink:
Can’t say anything about ffmpeg stabilty though. Maybe the HH freeze came with the change to rtsp.

#11

@izeman What’s your experience with mjpeg, as a whole in HH?
Surprisingly, it’s really fast and near real-time on Lovelace.

#12

@izeman from the investigation, it looks like the most probably reasons is slow processing speed that can’t handle live stream continuously. Current video stream flow in the app is not very optimized, but it usually isn’t the issue for short live preview.
There are several issues with format support and performance related to camera widget, so there is an ongoing project to overhaul that implementation. It is quiet a large project that also have challenges of fragmented support for video formats in Android.
If I understood your widget configuration correctly, as possible workaround, try setting up widget to refresh a snapshot every second or so instead of live stream, that should generally work better.

#13

@igor: Slow processing of the Android device? It’s not the newest, but it’s reasonably fast to work with.
As much as I’d prefer a LIVE videostream, I already set to 10s update, but the problem still is there (and this also was set to 10s when I sent the log).
Unfortunately the video function is not useable as it’s implemented right now.
Maybe try to find a suggested ideal video format, so we can try this first and hopefully get best results.

#14

I meant that for each video frame app is currently doing too much work to process and render it, which might be a problem on some devices. There are improvements in the works for that.

Oh ok, that wasn’t clear before. 10s refresh should not have any performance issues, so there might be another problem. Will check

MJPEG is currently best supported format, but some users do have issues with it.

What is the camera model do you use?

#15

I made two entities in HA to test different modes:

camera:

If I use Tab_Cam the picture has a lag of 35(!!)s. Totally unusable.
If I use MJPEG (used from the beginning - and used when pulling logs) I get the above issues from first post.

This is the camera: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B077MFPGTN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1