v1.0.0 — first release

A Home Assistant integration for Hikvision NVRs and DVRs: live view, recorded-history playback, motion and detection events, health sensors, a Lovelace card, a sidebar panel and a REST API. Added from the UI, no YAML.

Requires Home Assistant 2025.2 or newer. Developed and verified against a DS-7608NI-K2/8P on firmware V4.40.015; capabilities are read from the device rather than assumed, so other ISAPI models work to the extent their firmware exposes the same surfaces.

Live view

Home Assistant's own camera element negotiates WebRTC through go2rtc, reaching a decoding frame in about a second on the reference device against roughly three to five for an HLS URL. HLS remains as a fallback and is only fetched if that path is unavailable or stays black — so a live view no longer starts an ffmpeg process nobody watches.

Playback and downloads

Scrub a day on a zoomable timeline and play any moment straight from the NVR's disks; nothing is copied or re-recorded locally. Zoom and pan work on the day already loaded, so neither waits on the device. History plays as a fragmented MP4 in a plain <video>, which starts sooner than HLS and seeks natively.

Downloads and exports come from the NVR's bulk endpoint rather than its playback RTSP, which the device paces at real time: sixty seconds of video in about four and a half seconds against a sixty second floor. Segments arrive whole, so the result is trimmed to the range asked for.

Events and health

Detections arrive over ISAPI's alert stream rather than being polled. The integration asks the device which events each channel supports and creates exactly those, and each type can be switched off — a capable NVR declares far more than most people want.

Health covers uptime, CPU, memory, per-disk usage, free space and status, and per-channel connectivity taken from the NVR's own probe rather than an ICMP ping, which is truer for cameras on the NVR's PoE subnet. A storage alarm re-reads the disks immediately, because an intermittent fault can begin and end between two sixty-second polls.

Live audio is offered on channels that actually have a microphone. G.711 passes through untouched.

Card, panel and API

The card and the Cameras sidebar entry register themselves on install: no Lovelace resource to add, no entity ids to look up, everything configurable from dropdowns. /api/hikvision_nvr/… serves third-party apps using ordinary Home Assistant tokens, documented endpoint by endpoint in docs/API.md.

Services

Search recordings, export to MP4, PTZ, reboot, and enable_notifications — for the condition that makes motion sensors sit silently off, where the NVR records a detection but never reports it. It has a preview mode, only ever adds the missing linkage, and is proven idempotent and strictly scoped against real hardware. A repair issue points at it when the device needs it.