Homekit integration

[Rob Taft]

First, let me say that I love the Alexa integration.  Paired with a FireTV stick and the Hubitat/API integration I can have Alexa automatically display video meeting certain criteria on my TV.  Great work!

However, we primarily use AppleTV...I have one on every TV in my house.  I believe Apple is now supporting PIP for security cameras through HomeKit, which would be a much cleaner implementation for me.  So if we are watching something on the TV, rather than it switching inputs to the FireTV it could just bring up the security camera in PIP.

Is a HomeKit integration on the timeline at all?  If not, is there any way it could be done via the API using Homebridge?

[Arno Hautala]

I think Arup has previously said that this isn't planned, possibly due to hardware requirements of HomeKit Secure Video. 

That said, there is a Homebridge plugin that has discussed this.

https://sunoo.github.io/homebridge-camera-ffmpeg/

I'm not sure what camera features are supported currently and what features would require Secure Video support. I do know that just viewing is free, 200GB iCloud storage is required for storing video from one camera, and 2TB is required for five.

This thread has a good deal of information about HSV support, especially in the second half of the thread.

https://github.com/Sunoo/homebridge-camera-ffmpeg/issues/338

That thread ultimately points to a different project which would be a dependency and is still working on the capability.

https://github.com/homebridge/HAP-NodeJS/issues/741#issuecomment-573441082

In my opinion, and I may be wrong here, I'm not sure how good of an experience this would be, with or without HSV support. Conceivably, Camect should be able to forward all known camera streams to HSV and pass along detections as motion alerts (which I think is required to trigger object detection by HSV). This however seems like it'd be a lot of redundant traffic with Camect receiving and rebroadcasting all camera streams. If Homebridge adds support for HSV, I'd think it'd be better to just use that directly.

All that said, I'd love to see some sort of support for HomeKit.

[R Spivack]

This really is a case of be careful what you are asking for...

IMHO, HomeKit video and HomeKit Secure Video (HSV) are some of the worst products/technology from Apple.

The User Interface is terrible, the features are very limited, and the restrictions are very severe.

No more than 5 cameras for HSV, uh, that just about kills it for anywhere here right away.

No local recording, no continuous recording.  Right there, it's a toy and not usable as a real security system.

Everything goes to the cloud as an encrypted stream?  Uh, really slow viewing, scrubbing, downloading/saving clips,  - just about all normal operations constantly stutter/pause as data is pulled down from the cloud.  Thumbnails of clips take forever to refresh.

Remote access?  Everything looping through a HomeKit Hub as a huge opaque "black box" - good luck trying to troubleshoot when, not if, it doesn't work.

And forget about HomeBridge adding HSV support.  I've tested several of the HomeBridge camera plug-ins (non HSV), and most of them simply fail when accessing remotely - completely unreliable.  Not picking on the open-source folks (it's amazing it works at all), but if regular cameras barely work, I have no expectations they can get HSV working in any decent form.

[Rob Taft]

Definitely good feedback, I don't have any experience with cameras on HomeKit or dealing with HSV.  I'm really only interested in viewing my video through the AppleTV (and maybe iPhone) triggered by motion.  Basically the same implementation as the Camect Alexa skill.

I haven't played with homebridge yet, but saw this thread that got me excited because it doesn't require reencoding. https://www.reddit.com/r/homebridge/comments/bz0ehc/homebridgecameraffmpeg_without_reencoding/

[CamectArup]

Rob: I think that others would probably love to hear how your Camect + Hubitat + Alexa set up works if it's not too complicated to put together. 

Re: Homekit ...  Last time I looked, commercial entities are not allowed to distribute or publicize products based on software-only implementations of the homekit protocol. (i.e., there are software implementations, but we can't use them.) For commercial products, you have to join the MFi alliance and meet a bunch of certification requirements that are fairly expensive. I think, but am not absolutely sure, that we'd be required to have a hardware component. (There are claims to the contrary, but in the official docs that are publicly available I did not see anything to that effect.) So -- although we have had a decent # of requests for homekit, it's not something we think we'll do anytime soon. Wyze, who has claimed to be interested in homekit, has also not managed to actually do it, and they're significantly larger than we are. Some of it was due to the same problems we'd face trying to do it. 

[Rob Taft]

Thanks Arup - I definitely plan to post the method with some detailed instructions.  It wasn't straightforward but it's not hard if you follow the right steps (I hope).  Only reason I haven't done so yet is I just discovered some inconsistent behavior over the last two days.  I'm still troubleshooting but my current thinking is that the command I'm sending Alexa for the Camect Skill isn't having consistent results.  It appears to work in some situations but not others.  Need to spend more time looking at it.

Re: Homekit - sorry to hear that Apple is making it so difficult.  I'm going to attempt to get my cameras into HomeKit using Homebridge as R Spivack described above. This is probably over my head but I'll give it a shot and report back.