How to view the camera in HomeKit

[mabrodeur]

Hi,

I installed Motion correctly as I can see the stream by going to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8081 and I have installed your homebridge module. If I take a snapshot from the web (localhost:7999/0/action/snapshot) I receive a notification in HomeKit correctly but I do not have the picture. Also I do not see my camera in HomeKit, only a motion sensor. Am I supposed to see the camera also? Am I doing something wrong? Thanks

[mabrodeur]

Oh well... The motion sensor was added automatically to my Home app but not the camera. I had to add the camera manually. However, now everything works fine. I can see the snapshot in my notification and in my Home app. But if I press on the feed, I get a "Camera unavailable" message and can't get the feed.

Any idea?

[mabrodeur]

Found it. Needed to add the homebridge user to the video user group so it has access to the feed.

[Gatzu75]

Hi Marc how you did it? what is the video user group?

[mabrodeur]

Hi, I did it based on this : https://github.crookster.org/Adding-A-Webcam-To-HomeKit/#usb-webcam---logitech-c615

This needs the user that runs homebridge to have permission to access the /dev/video0 device where the kernel interface to camera gets made available. In my setup, the user is homebridge and the video group is video

So basically sudo usermod -aG video homebridge would do the trick

Then you need to logout/login or simply reboot and it should work

[mabrodeur]

If you setup your homebridge to launch on startup using systemd as explained here : https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge/wiki/Running-HomeBridge-on-a-Raspberry-Pi#running-homebridge-on-bootup-systemd You should have a user named homebridge

[Gatzu75]

at moment I'm still using PI user (just to test) but the stream seems not work.

[mabrodeur]

Do you run homebridge as a service or you are just calling homebridge ? Does it work if you run homebridge while logged in as the pi user? Can you give me the log, maybe I could help.

[Gatzu75]

no I'm still calling homebrige with pi user and it doesn't work. i used "sudo usermod -aG video pi" too.

[mabrodeur]

Does homebridge run and you do not see the feed or does it crash? Can you access the feed if you go directly on http://raspberry-pi-ip-here:8081 in a web browser?

[Gatzu75]

everything seems work fine: homebridge is running and the accessories are installed on my iphone. The notification is working and i'm able to see the snapshots. In the web browser, I'm correctly see the cam streaming. But whe I try to see the cam streaming, homekit shows me "camera unavailable".

[mabrodeur]

I followed this tutorial to run homebridge as a service : https://timleland.com/setup-homebridge-to-start-on-bootup/

And then I added the homebridge user to my video group and rebooted. It then worked... I do not have this plugin installed right now so I really can't test things to help you sorry.

[Gatzu75]

are you running MOTION as service too? how is your motion config file?

[mabrodeur]

I wiped my partition so I do not have access to it. I opted for another plugin instead as the motion detection faque pretty bad. It was alway triggering notifications and I couldn't manage to make it less sensitive. I was using : MotionEye which (I guess) runs motion as a service and adds a nice WebUI to control your motion config. As I didn't run motion by itself I can't tell sorry. I went for https://github.com/KhaosT/homebridge-camera-ffmpeg which work pretty great. I don't have motion detection, but I will plug a IR Motion sensor in the GPIO to act as a motion detector in homekit with something like that : https://github.com/Killerameise/homebridge-infrared-motion-sesnor-gpio I will have way better detection and if you put both of the in the same room you will get a screenshot when a motion is detected (I need to validate this)

[Gatzu75]

it is a solution close to what I was thinking about.. thanks