I find that most AI answers are full of errors and are really only useful for topics I know nothing about - those answers are always on point.

Excuse me while I go scrape the spackle off my driveway (did you know it was a great substitute for sidewalk deicer?).

You don’t need the app to set up the wireless devices either. See https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/reolink#qr-code

Ok. Here you go… https://www.dbrand666.com/home-assistant-media-player-with-voice-input/

I have a couple of Pi Zeros around the house I use as media players. They were running piCorePlayer. I replaced just the software with a vanilla Pi OS and installed Squeezelite and then Wyoming Satellite. I added a microphone and an automation to silence the media player as soon as a wake word is detected.

Voice recognition is adequate but I wish it was smarter.

(I should finish that blog post…)

🤣

I used to have a Ring and became concerned about privacy once Amazon took over. Worse, all it used to capture was delivery people’s backs - by the time it would see motion the action was almost over. That’s when it captured anything at all - it used to miss a lot.

Reolink doesn’t require any Internet access - even for initial setup. People detection works great with Frigate and you can tell it to start recording before motion is detected so you don’t miss anything.

Full disclosure, it does take some fiddling to get it working reliably. I still don’t have 2 way audio working.

Homebridge might be worth a shot. I know its Nest integration is better in some ways than HA’s native integration.

“The open source part of iVentoy” is on GitHub. Perhaps it’s not completely open?

I may have a dud. We’ll see. I finally started getting responses yesterday. Seems their help desk system was upgraded and the email was broken?

Maybe my use case is unusual. This is my only camera and I’d prefer avoiding an NVR setup - mostly because I don’t love the idea of running a constant hi def video stream over WiFi.

The documentation for this camera made me think it would be able to detect motion and record a video of activity from a few seconds before the motion was detected until a few seconds after it ends and FTP it to a server of my choice. From what I can see, it can successfully do this for snapshots but not for videos.

Back to your question, I upgraded immediately to the latest firmware before doing anything - the Home Assistant addon told me to. I then tried going back one version to see if it was just a bug in the latest firmware.

As an aside, the HA integration seems to be working flawlessly. It would be pretty easy to have HA trigger a capture of the video stream but that wouldn’t contain the pre-motion capture that the doorbell seems to have.

As luck would have it, I finally got a response from Reolink through Walmart in response to my opening a return ticket a few days ago. I’ll give them a couple more days to troubleshoot and update here.

Time to start a frigate vs motioneye vs blueiris thread!

That is one expensive doorbell!

I really hate YouTube reviews, but thanks. Maybe I should try another Reolink before I go elsewhere.

Yeah. I’m trying to stick to open protocols.

Thanks! I’ll take a look.

You don’t need to create an Amcrest account or let it dial home at all?

It used to work. I’m not surprised he found someone to disable it. He seems determined to make the place as painful as he can.

First thing I did after he bought Twitter is block him. Did I hurt his feelings?

(Not that I follow what’s going on with Twitter anymore since I found Mastodon.)