Generic IP Camera

The generic camera platform allows you to integrate any IP camera or other URL into Home Assistant. Templates can be used to generate the URLs on the fly.

Home Assistant will serve the images via its server, making it possible to view your IP cameras while outside of your network. The endpoint is /api/camera_proxy/camera.[name].

To enable this camera in your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
camera:
  - platform: generic
    still_image_url: http://194.218.96.92/jpg/image.jpg

Configuration variables:

still_image_url (Required): The URL your camera serves the image on, eg. http://192.168.1.21:2112/. Can be a template.
name (Optional): This parameter allows you to override the name of your camera.
username (Optional): The username for accessing your camera.
password (Optional): The password for accessing your camera.
authentication (Optional): Type for authenticating the requests basic (default) or digest.
limit_refetch_to_url_change (Optional): True/false value (default: false). Limits re-fetching of the remote image to when the URL changes. Only relevant if using a template to fetch the remote image.
content_type (Optional): Set the content type for the IP camera if it is not a jpg file (default: image/jpeg). Use image/svg+xml to add a dynamic svg file.

Screenshot showing Google Maps integration in Home Assistant front end. Example showing the Generic camera platform pointing at a dynamic Google Map image.

Examples

In this section you find some real life examples of how to use this camera platform.

Weather graph from yr.no

camera:
  - platform: generic
    name: Weather
    still_image_url: https://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo/meteogram.svg
    content_type: 'image/svg+xml'

Local image with Hass.io

You can show a static image with this platform. Just place the image here: /config/www/your_image.png

camera:
  - platform: generic
    name: Some Image
    still_image_url: https://127.0.0.1:8123/local/your_image.png

Sharing a camera feed from one Home Assistant instance to another

If you are running more than one Home Assistant instance (let’s call them the ‘host’ and ‘receiver’ instances) you may wish to display the camera feed from the host instance on the receiver instance. You can use the REST API to access the camera feed on the host (IP address 127.0.0.5) and display it on the receiver instance by configuring the receiver with the the following:

camera:
  - platform: generic
    name: Host instance camera feed
    still_image_url: https://127.0.0.5:8123/api/camera_proxy/camera.live_view