I'm in the early stages of deciding on smart home components for a home under construction. At this point, I've pretty much settled on HE (currently C7 for bench testing, but will buy a C8 for the new home), Reolink POE cameras and NVR, and z-wave devices.
My wife is very pro-Apple, so I will probably include Homekit in the mix to give her an iPhone/iPad UI (including camera viewing). That's what this topic is about.
I haven't bench tested my Reolink cameras with HE yet, but based on the number of posts about Reolink, I'm assuming that they can work well together.
My understanding is that Homekit doesn't support Reolink cameras. I watched a video that showed how to "connect" Reolink cameras/NVRs to Homekit via Homebridge and Scrypted. They seemed like reasonable solutions.
My question... can the HE (with Apple Homekit Integration) provide the same bridge functionality between Reolink POE cameras and NVR and Homekit that is provided by Homebridge and Scrypted, or will I still need Homebridge or Scrypted for Homekit to work with the Reolink stuff?
I have a reolink doorbell (pretty much the same as their cameras). Fantastic picture. I use Camect to bring them into hubitat. Most of my other cameras are Foscam though.
I’m using my reolink POE doorbell with Scrypted to get it into the Apple home app. You could use Homebridge as well, I believe, but I had heard good things about how Scrypted handles IP cams, so I tried it out for my six Hikvision cams in addition to my doorbell, and I’ve been happy with it.
Hubitat’s HomeKit integration can’t be used to stream or record camera footage in the Apple Home app.
The video I watched recommended Scrypted over Homebridge, but not by much. I was leaning towards Homebridge because I prefer packaged appliances (Hoobs as a Homebridge package solution in this case) over DIY/software solutions. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Scrypted is offered as a packaged appliance.
