Ezviz camera in Home Assistant

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Ezviz camera in Home Assistant

You do not need a Ezviz Cloud account to add your Ezviz camera's to the Home Assistant. You just need a few lines of Yaml code to add them to your HA Dashboard.

A Digital Assistant, also known as a mobile assistant or virtual digital assistant, is a computer program designed to assist a user by answering questions and performing basic tasks.

Now if you are like me and you have a lot of domotica in your home... or you have like me a Smart Home.

If you really are a nerd like me and you like privacy above anything else I guess you are using Home Assistant instead of Google Home or Alexa.

What is Home Assistant

Home assistant is an open-source and free application that is used for home automation to work with your smart home or smart devices. It is a complete local alternative to solutions like SmartThings and HomeBridge. Home assistant enabled the local control of smart home devices, offering better security, greater reliability, and more flexibility than many cloud-connected devices.

And above all! It is offering the best privacy there is!!!

It also offers you the control of home automation without the need for cloud, thus your home automation system is not dependent on remote servers or an internet connection. It's fast, installs in a breeze on a Raspberry Pi it's flexible and supports a majority of smart devices and doesn’t use your network.

What is a Smart Home

A smart home is a home setup where devices, apps, gadgets and machines/ appliances can automatically be controlled remotely from anywhere where there is a connection to the internet. These 'devices' in a smart home are connected through the internet, allowing the user to control functions such as camera's, lighting, temperature settings, security access and home theater remotely.

Adding your Ezviz Camera to Home Assistant

Ezviz, as on their site stated, connects lives through easily accessible wireless cameras, action cams, surveillance kits, and home automation tools.

Ezviz has all kind of different camera's and I've got 5 of them. 3 outdoor, 1 door video bell and one inside camera.

Ezviz camera's are cheap, good and reliable. There is only one small problem with them. If you want to connect them to your Home Assistant you need cloud!

Really? Nope not with this fix!!

Adding your Ezviz Camera's to Home Assistant is easy! You need just a few things you can find in the Ezviz App.

  1. The IP address of the camera
  2. The 'secret token'.

Both can be found in the settings of the camera.

Got them?

Now, open your configuration.yaml file and add the following lines.

You put the "secret token" on the place where the ******** are. And you put the right IP address where it says : 192.168.XXX.XXX

camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: CamName_1
    input: "rtsp://admin:*******@192.168.XXX.XXX:554"

You can add even more! Like this

camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: CamName_1
    input: "rtsp://admin:*******@192.168.XXX.XXX:554"
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: CamName_2
    input: "rtsp://admin:*******@192.168.XXX.XXX:554"
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: CamName_3
    input: "rtsp://admin:*******@192.168.XXX.XXX:554"

Home Assistant Horizontal-stack of ezviz camera'sHome Assistant Horizontal-stack of ezviz camera's

If you want to place your camera on your home assistant dashboard just use the manual Yaml add on when adding a card to your dashboard and fill in:

  - type: picture-entity
    entity: camera.camname_1

If you want multiple Ezviz camera's showing up in your dashboard just add more lines like the above 2 lines.

You can also combine cards 2 or 3 or 4 or.. well more in a horizontal stack. I've got 4 cams and stacked them 2 in one column.

This is very easy with the following script. Just add it to your dashboard.

type: horizontal-stack
title: Cams
cards:
  - type: picture-entity
    entity: camera.camname_1
  - type: picture-entity
    entity: camera.camname_2
view_layout:
  position: sidebar

Just change the entity names to your correct ones. So your camname_1 and camename_2.

That's it!!

Did you find this article valuable?

Support Theo van der Sluijs by becoming a sponsor. Any amount is appreciated!