There are various old threads here showing how easy it should be to put a live video feed from Blue Iris on my Hubitat dashboard. I have verified that my Blue Iris server is successfully showing images and video streams with no password required on port 81. I have tried every combination of known working URLs in a Hubitat dashboard tile with either the Image or Video Player template, but can't make it work. For example, this shows a camera image of my front yard: http://10.10.10.10:81/image/Front
But putting this URL in the Background Image Link field shows nothing on the tile.
Similarly, this shows a live feed from the same camera: http://10.10.10.10:81/mjpg/Front/video.mjpg
But putting this URL in the Video URL of a Video Player tile shows nothing.
I do exactly this with BlueIris feeds on dashboards and I just confirmed it works fine with an image tile. The syntax is “http://[camera-IP]:81/mjpg/[camera-name]/video.mjpg”. You can find this syntax and its options/parameters more fully explicated in the Blue Iris help document.
Also - I can’t quite tell from your post whether you want a still image from your camera to be the background of your dashboard, or whether you want a dashboard tile to show the camera’s video feed. If the former, use “background image link”. If the latter, use “Image URL”.
Be sure to add a refresh interval. I use 1 second personally. Since the dashboard is really showing a series of still images and not a video (I know, I know, a video is just a rapid set of still images), you have to specify how frequently Hubitat updates the image. I find with one second, you’re not overwhelming the hub’s processor yet you’re still getting a decent “video” picture. But YMMV
I do not use any refresh with my .mjpg feeds from iSpy. Isn't the whole idea of .mjpg that it feeds the images constantly into a video format? I get many frames per second just putting the .mjpg feed url in the Image field.
Thank you all for the quick replies! I'm not too worried about how often the tile updates- once per second seems just fine. I just can't get anything from Blue Iris to show up on the tile. Adding the ?fps=1 in an image tile like Ranchitat suggested didn't make a difference. Mluck confirmed that this works for him, and I have tried adding a refresh interval. The URLs I posted open live images and video feeds in a browser, they just don't show up in my Hubitat tiles. Could I be missing something simple with the setup of the dashboard? Do I need specific devices associated with it?
I then entered the same URL into a Hubitat "image tile" (under "Image URL" ) and it did not work. So exactly what you are experiencing.
To make my testing easier, I moved from my phone to a PC.
This time VLC was asking for a Name and Password, even though the BlueIris server was configured to only require authentication from Non-LAN sources.
I even setup the BI server to require Authentication from "No Connections", and VLC still wanted a password.
I finally enabled the Anonymous user in BlueIris, and VLC connected without asking for login credentials.
The Dashboard tile that I had already created, began to stream video.
So I can't explain why one version of VLC requires a password, and another version doesn't. Or why BlueIris required Authentication at all for these local logins.
The only way the Dashboard would work was to enable the Anonymous User .
This isn't a good solution for security reasons, but if this solves your problem as well, it might point you in the right direction.
BTW I am using BlueIris release 5.7.7.18 from 2023.
Shouldn't.
I have an "Outside Cameras" dashboard for four ZigBee/Z-Wave Plugs.
They're the only devices on the list and the four tiles are set as follows.
So was I. The .mjpg files will "stream" into an image tile and appear as video. I probably get about 5-10 frames/sec, it is pretty smooth, but you can see some choppiness.
Edit: So back to the point, this happens without a need for a refresh time set in the image tile.
