Battery-powered Reolink via Home Hub

[ASTRELION]

Hello,

Is it possible to use Frigate with a battery-powered Reolink camera if the camera is connected to a Home Hub? I've seen that battery-powered cameras are not supported, but what about with an intermediate hub like Home Hub? The Home Hub is on 24/7 and is where I would get RTSP and ONVIF connections, so is there a way to get a continuous stream from the Home Hub without waking the camera? This is the camera/hub I'm curious about.

I saw this #8935 (comment) for Blink cameras, so I'm assuming I would need something like that. Ideally it would just stream the last frame until the camera wakes itself.

I'm using Home Assistant so I could just use the Reolink integration, but it would be nice to have all cameras managed in one place and to have the additional flexibility/configuration Frigate offers over Reolink's.

[inkeep-ai-assistant[bot]]

Battery-powered Reolink cameras connected through a Home Hub face significant challenges with Frigate(1). While the Home Hub can provide an RTSP stream, the fundamental issue is that continuous streaming will drain the camera battery quickly because the camera must stay "awake" to maintain the stream(1).

According to the discussion on this exact setup, when Frigate continuously streams from a battery camera (even through a hub), "it has to stay 'awake' and streaming the entire time"(1). This defeats the purpose of a battery-powered camera and will drain the battery too fast(1).

Frigate is designed to work with always-connected cameras(2). While battery-powered cameras are technically supported in that they can work, Frigate is not designed to work with these types of cameras out of the box(1).

Workarounds mentioned:

You can dynamically enable/disable cameras in Home Assistant using the camera.turn_on and camera.turn_off actions(3). This would allow you to only enable the camera stream when needed (like when motion is detected by the Reolink integration), then disable it afterward to preserve battery.

Some users have created bridges for battery cameras (like the Blink and Arlo examples you mentioned), which use clever ffmpeg behavior to work around these limitations(1). However, there's no official Frigate support for this approach with Reolink Home Hub cameras.

Bottom line: While you might be able to configure the RTSP stream from the Home Hub, continuous streaming will drain your battery. You'd need to implement automation to enable/disable the camera strategically, which adds complexity compared to always-on cameras.

📚 Sources:

1. [Config Support]: Help configuring new Reolink Battery WiFi Doorbell
2. Feature to exclude a camera from the over all system health
3. Remotely enable/disable a battery-powered camera

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