Pause/resume capture?

[bjeanes]

I'm wondering if it would be possible to pause and resume the capture of frames for this integration? Perhaps with a service to start and stop? The use-case here is to stop capturing at a low light level and just show frames from when the image (from a camera) is light. Before finding this integration, I was planning to use the camera.* services to take a photo conditionally and have a ffmpeg process stitch together the frames into a video to play, but something like this integration would work much nicer if it were possible to suppress capture (e.g. from an automation).

[evilmarty]

@bjeanes you can achieve that by turning the camera off and on via services.

[bjeanes]

Ah fantastic. I didn't realise that would have that effect already :). Thanks for the prompt reply!

[bjeanes]

@evilmarty ah the caveat here is that stopping the camera also stops me from viewing the accumulated timelapse (the /api/camera_proxy/camera.xxxx/ route returns a 503`. More so I'm hoping to have it continue to show/loop the frames that do exist but stop capturing new frames. This is for a timelapse of a garden situation, so being able to see if the plant was starting to droop before the lights went out to identify watering issues is the goal here.

Any ideas?

[evilmarty]

@bjeanes if that is so then it'll have to be controlled by service calls, which need to be implemented.

[evilmarty]

@bjeanes I've added the ability to use service calls to pause and resume recording. Hopefully that should suffice your needs.

[bjeanes]

Thank you! I'll try it out tonight.

[bjeanes]

I was unable to get this working. I updated to the 3e4fa7a via HACS, restarted HA, but the new services do not show up in service dev tools.

If I create an automation to use what I assume is the service names (based on looking at the code), I get:

The services don't show up under mjpeg_timelapse nor camera:

[evilmarty]

There's a newer version with some fixes. Can you try update and try again?

[bjeanes]

I'm on 3e4fa7a already and AFAICT that is the tip of main

[evilmarty]

It's odd that the services don't appear. Are there any errors in the logs?

[bjeanes]

Nothing that I can see, no. I will try uninstalling and re-installing the integration via HACS, restarting in between. Perhaps those service registrations only happen once and not each boot...

[bjeanes]

Uninstalled HACS. Restarted. Re-installed. Restarted. Still only the Clear images service shows up. As a sanity check, I SSHd into HASS to check that it is using the right version of the code:

[core-ssh mjpeg_timelapse]$ pwd
/root/config/custom_components/mjpeg_timelapse

[core-ssh mjpeg_timelapse]$ cat services.yaml
clear_images:
  name: Clear images
  description: Deletes all recorded images.
  target:
    entity:
      integration: mjpeg_timelapse
      domain: camera
pause_recording:
  name: Pause recording
  description: Pauses fetching and saving images.
  target:
    entity:
      integration: mjpeg_timelapse
      domain: camera
resume_recording:
  name: Resume recording
  description: Resumes saving images.
  target:
    entity:
      integration: mjpeg_timelapse
      domain: camera

If I grep for clear_images vs the new services, the only notable difference is that only clear_images is registered in async_setup_platform: https://github.com/evilmarty/mjpeg-timelapse/blob/3e4fa7a02c2ecdfb3e582cd3b99b76bdad4a98aa/custom_components/mjpeg_timelapse/camera.py#L100-L111

Is that perhaps the issue?

[evilmarty]

That bit of code doesn't do anything. The part that does is above it in async_setup_entry:

https://github.com/evilmarty/mjpeg-timelapse/blob/3e4fa7a02c2ecdfb3e582cd3b99b76bdad4a98aa/custom_components/mjpeg_timelapse/camera.py#L77-L97

It's weird that one is working whilst the other is not. What version of HA are you using?

[evilmarty]

@bjeanes I figured it out. You are right, if you defined your entries in customization.yml then they would not be available. If you had used the HA they would have been available.

[bjeanes]

Hah! ~I see. Can you make it work with customizations.yml?~ I am using that because you have not enabled re-configuration via HA and so I'm still tweaking a few things. Working now!