Hi folks,

I'm struggling a bit with pulling camera streams into Home Assistant via BI. What seems to be happening, is that the BI integration is using the main stream and I suspect is also re-encoding it. My cameras are mostly h.265 and high-res and the usual display devices are a tablet and mobile phones, so using the main streams isn't a good idea.

One example: If I point VLC at the camera's main stream, it's 4k x 2k, h.265; the substream from that cam is 640x480, h.265. The BI RTSP stream for the same camera is 1280x720, h.264, which is very different, so the BI server is having to do quite a lot of work to create that. CPU rises ~5% to stream just one camera (and there is a nVidia GPU in the box!) If I remove the forced image size in BI's web/advanced page, I get the full resolution but still h.264 and with a 2~3 second delay vs the BI console.

What I need, I guess, is to get the camera substream directly, no re-encoding, no anything. I could do that straight from the camera, but it feels messy to mix the BI integration with direct connections to cameras.

Does anyone know how to get a RTSP stream from BI that is the raw substream from the camera and how to persuade the HA integration to use it?

Thanks!

jefft wrote: ↑Sun Jul 23, 2023 3:43 pm What I need, I guess, is to get the camera substream directly, no re-encoding, no anything.

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Make sure 'direct-to-disk' recording is enabled in BI to use sub-streams effectively and ensure they are properly identified in BI's configuration for the camera. This should do exactly what it sounds like it should do and should provide both RTSP streams as configured in the cameras themselves along with eliminating any additional encoding beyond what the camera itself is spitting out -- unless otherwise manipulated in the BI configuration...., with some exceptions, of course. 'Direct-to-disk' is the key here and should also reduce your CPU load considerably if it's not yet activated.

Thanks, but I've always used D2D, no change to encoding, both streams, etc etc for recordings. That doesn't help with the rtsp streams provided by the BI web server, which area the issue here.

Gotcha. UI3 does indeed re-encode, though is somewhat manageable depending on bandwidth availability and end point platform.

Why not just directly access the original camera streams from HA?

Out of curiosity, a quick search turned up the following here: https://blueirissoftware.com/forum/view ... 6&start=10

The second to last post may be helpful in adjusting the encoding properties for a more acceptable viewing result, though I don't think it will apply directly to your HA issue(s). Those may be better addressed by the HA community.

sorry to reopen a thread here, but having same issue. all my h.265 are getting re-encoded to h.264 when using web player viewer. all modern browsers now support playback of hvec.. can we get this support? i have direct to disk enabled as well