Question on restreaming ONVIF (and my experience with Wyze Cams)

[rocket59]

I plan on getting a Reolink doorbell which I understand sends the button press as part of the onvif stream. As frigate doesn't support the button, I plan on using Scrypted or Home Assistant to do the button detection and use frigate for recording and object detection. So my question is: if we restream the camera from frigate to scrypted/HA is this data preserved ? If so do we use the standard parameters as per the documentation?

Also sharing my experience with Wyze cams (v2/v3). I was previously accessing 2 RTSP streams from the cameras for different purposes with other software. And since I started I kept getting constant ffmpeg crashes/detection issues which are generally understood to be primarily due to bad connections/flaky wifi. My aha moment was to restream one of the troublesome cameras and interestingly most of the random errors on the others went away! The system is now much more stable (more so after using restream on the rest of the cameras. In hindsight this was a pretty obvious conclusion (those low powered CPUs really struggle to provide more than 1 stream) but I was considering replacing them with the more reliable dahuas/hikvisions.

[NickM-27]

if we restream the camera from frigate to scrypted/HA is this data preserved ?

The camera stream and doorbell press are completely separate pieces of data. They are not packaged together.

[rocket59]

Thanks - so it's not possible to pass this through from frigate?

[NickM-27]

There's nothing to pass through, the HA integration works using the reolink API directly so it must communicate with the doorbell directly

[rocket59]

Got it. Thanks.

[mayo]

@NickM-27 I've started poking at this couple of days ago and looking at the debug output from the Reolink HA integration. I'm pretty certain they use ONVIF to receive the button event.

I know this is currently not supported in Frigate (at least it doesn't seem to be), but is there interest in having this kind of out of band actions exposed in Frigate? I'd be interested in having a go at it, if it's something that will be welcome. Does anyone know if there are folks working on anything like this already?

[NickM-27]

It does not use onvif only, we can see this because the reolink doorbell must be able to connect to HomeAssistant via http across the same local network. (see the issues regarding self signed certs and using across vlans).

In any case, the number of doorbells that support ONVIF and sending this event seems to be 1, I do not believe that this is worth the effort of maintaining or supporting this as it will just take time out of supporting features that will benefit more users.

Other maintainers may have a different opinion

[mayo]

I'm pretty certain there are other doorbells that do this (for eg. Amcrest AD410), as well as other cameras push values that can be useful such as sound detection, tamper sensors, storage errors, etc.

Thank you for the honest response, though, and saving my time. I'll find other ways to integrate these.