Best fit cameras for C8

I am looking through the blog and documentation and I did not find the cameras that would be best supported by C8. I have Nest cameras but don't think I can pair them with Hubitat

Honestly, cameras is really not something Hubitat excels at. Iirc there are drivers that let you show rtsp streams in dashboards, but they will hog your CPU and show down your hub.

The best option IMO is to use Apple Home with HomeBridge to access them that way. Eg,

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Tanks for the info. I thought hubitat would control wifi cam, but i see they don't...at least not without drivers

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It can be done, but just isnt worth it IME. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, HomeBridge in a docker container or on a RasPi is the best option.

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What I found is there is really not much to be done with Cameras in Hubitat past putting the image on a dashboard. I don't need to control my cameras, they are just on. You can just use an external camera server, and get feeds from that to Hubitat.

I use iSpy on an old laptop. It broadcasts my feeds to Hubitat, and I get full streaming video on a dashboard image tile. It doesn't seem to do anything to Hubitat CPU or slow down my hub.

I also use iSpy's "call API" feature on Alert, with the alert being motion. It makes a call to a virtual motion sensor to set it active in Hubitat, using the Maker API app. Many options for motions detection in iSpy, and even only in specific areas where you draw boxes on the screen.

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I assume that is sending JPEG still images? When I tried it with H.264 streams, it dragged my C7's to their knees.

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@novate418 I use mostly Foscam with some reolink's and use Camect to bring them into Hubitat. Works great.

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It really depends on what you mean by “supported.”

What did you have in mind? Camera feed on a Hubitat dashboard, as others have mentioned? Or other points of integration with Hubitat as well?

essentially camera feed on hubitat dashboard!

No, full streaming video just appears in the image tile. I can have the feed up on multiple dashboards and it still causes no load that I can tell.

This is my Image URL in the image tile: http://10.0.0.32:8080/video.mjpg?oid=3&size=820X480

10.0.0.32 is the laptop that is hosting iSpy. oid is the camera number if you have multiple cameras.

Foscam can easily stream to a til

If a camera stream can be configured to use mjpeg, then it can usually be added to a Hubitat dashboard directly.

@user2574’s method of using another device as a camera server to rebroadcast a stream to Hubitat (I assume as mjpeg) is another way to create a stream that Hubitat can handle on a dashboard.

That’s an MJPG aka Motion jpg, so just still images being sent one after the other. H.264 video is quite different.

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Ah, that makes sense since it works in an image tile. It is pretty smooth video though.

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That’s usually good enough to fool the human eye into perceiving a moving image :slightly_smiling_face:.

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Absolutely, I’m mainly mentioning it because the processing overheads for MJPG are very low compared to H264 video.

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Which solution were you using to get an H264 stream onto a Hubitat dashboard?

I’m not, i can’t recall what I tried, but eventually I settled for homebridge into the apple home app.

Agree with @dJOS that Hubitat is not designed to play well with cameras.

That said, a couple things:

  • if you're willing to incorporate an NVR (I personally like Blue Iris), it is easily integrated with Hubitat to do all the things I imagine you'd want to do.
  • check out the dahua/amcrest integration by @tomw. Tom is great and this integration is smooth and effective.

Happy hunting...

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Your nest cameras can absolutely integrate into Hubitat, the Google SDM app can do it. They can serve as triggers for automatons, person detection, etc