The Camera

The Camera

If your feeder has a camera, you get live video with audio in Home Assistant, plus the latest motion snapshot as a still image. There is no camera URL to find and nothing to copy over from another app. It just appears.

What you get

• camera.<feeder>_camera is the live stream. Put it on a dashboard, open it in the app, cast it to a screen.
• image.<feeder>_last_motion_snapshot is the most recent picture the feeder took when it saw movement. It updates by itself and costs almost nothing.

For a dashboard you leave open all day, use the snapshot. Save the live stream for when you actually want to watch. Your feeder will thank you, and so will the phone app.

The one thing worth understanding

The feeder only accepts a couple of video connections at a time. That is a limit in the hardware, not something the integration can work around. If Home Assistant holds a connection open permanently, the Philips app can find itself pushed out and unable to show live view.

So by default the integration is polite about it. It connects when something actually asks for video, and lets go a few minutes after the last viewer leaves. Open the camera card and the picture appears; walk away and the feeder gets its connection back.

The three streaming modes

Change these under Settings, then Devices & Services, then Philips Pet Series, then Configure.

On demand. The default, and the right choice for nearly everyone. Connects only while someone is watching.

Always on. Holds the connection open permanently. Choose this if a recorder such as Frigate needs the stream to be there all the time. Expect the phone app to lose live view while Home Assistant has it.

Disabled. No live video at all. The snapshot image still works. Useful if you only want the feeding side, or if the camera is causing trouble and you want it out of the way.

There is also a camera idle timeout, between 1 and 60 minutes, controlling how long the connection is kept after the last viewer leaves. Five minutes is the default. Raise it if you flip between dashboards a lot and dislike the short reconnect wait. Lower it to hand the camera back to the app sooner.

About "Error opening stream" in the log

If you run in the default on-demand mode, you will sometimes see lines like this in the Home Assistant log:

Error opening stream (Connection refused, rtsp://127.0.0.1:8560/philips-pet-...)

This is expected and it is not a fault. It happens when Home Assistant's video worker tries the old address again after the connection has been released for being idle. The next time you actually open the camera, it reconnects and works.

If the noise bothers you, set streaming to Always on, or raise the idle timeout so the connection is released less often.

Camera settings you can change

switch.<feeder>_privacy_mode turns the camera off completely, which is the honest choice if the feeder lives somewhere you would rather not have a lens.

The rest are on the device page: night vision, motion sensitivity, motion alarm, image flip for an upside-down mount, the on-screen timestamp, anti-flicker for banding under artificial light, and speaker volume. They are listed in full on Your Devices and Entities.

Next

Recording the Camera if you want it in an NVR.