RTSP Stream Nearly Unusable with Reolink Home Hub

[mdwhitten]

The problem

I seem to be having a similar issue to #133775: the RTSP streaming with the Home Hub Pro is very unstable. I have had a Lumus Pro WiFi streaming 4k over RTSP for several months without issue. That camera has not been added to Home Hub, intentionally, and continues to work great.

I added three Duo 2s to a Home Hub Pro. Prior to adding the Duos to the Home Hub, I was successfully streaming RTSP to Home Assistant with similar performance to the Lumus Pro - quick loading, smooth playback, etc.

However, after adding these devices to the Home Hub Pro the RTSP streaming gets quite poor. The devices take quite a long time to load, show significant amounts of lag, and eventually fail to load whatsoever in Home Assistant. Meanwhile, on the same device where the stream fails to load I can run the Reolink app and receive the Clear 4k stream with no delays, stuttering, etc. So, the issue seems to lie either with the RTSP stream coming from the Home Hub Pro, or some conflict with the HA integration.

As with the other post, switching to FLV immediately improves performance - now, the streams load nearly instantly just like the Lumus (which, again, is still on RTSP).

I apologize as I know I'm basically saying "it just doesn't work very well", which isn't all that helpful for debugging. Please let me know if there are useful debugging steps I can perform.

What version of Home Assistant Core has the issue?

core-2025.6.1

What was the last working version of Home Assistant Core?

No response

What type of installation are you running?

Home Assistant OS

Integration causing the issue

Reolink

Link to integration documentation on our website

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/reolink

Diagnostics information

config_entry-reolink-01JYAMVQEZGF074MY8E83EBNP8-2.json

Example YAML snippet

Anything in the logs that might be useful for us?

Additional information

No response

[home-assistant]

Hey there @starkillerOG, mind taking a look at this issue as it has been labeled with an integration (reolink) you are listed as a code owner for? Thanks!

Code owner commands

Code owners of reolink can trigger bot actions by commenting:

• @home-assistant close Closes the issue.
• @home-assistant rename Awesome new title Renames the issue.
• @home-assistant reopen Reopen the issue.
• @home-assistant unassign reolink Removes the current integration label and assignees on the issue, add the integration domain after the command.
• @home-assistant add-label needs-more-information Add a label (needs-more-information, problem in dependency, problem in custom component) to the issue.
• @home-assistant remove-label needs-more-information Remove a label (needs-more-information, problem in dependency, problem in custom component) on the issue.

_{^{(message by CodeOwnersMention)}}

---

reolink documentation
reolink source
_{^{(message by IssueLinks)}}

[starkillerOG]

Did you add the Duo camaras directly to the WiFi of the Home Hub Pro or did you use your existing WiFi of the house?

I would advice disabeling the wifi of the Home Hub Pro and using your own wifi network and connect the DUO cameras through your LAN.

[mdwhitten]

Hi @starkillerOG , thanks for the reply. These are the POE versions of the Duo. WiFi is disabled on the Home Hub (but not relevant anyway since no cameras connected to the Hub are using WiFi). That's part of why this is strange - no WiFi latency/interference problems here.

HomeAssistant, the Hub, and the connected PC where the problem is evident are all connected via Ethernet.

[mdwhitten]

I should also clarify the RTSP streams that are struggling are the Fluent streams.

Here's a table of the working and failing configuration:

• Lumus Pro (Clear) RTSP >> WiFi >> HA: ✅
• Duo 2 PoE (Fluent) RTSP >> LAN >> HA: ✅
• Duo 2 PoE (Fluent) RTSP >> LAN >> Home Hub Pro >> LAN >> HA: ❌
• Duo 2 PoE (Fluent) RTMP >> LAN >> Home Hub Pro >> LAN >> HA: ✅

[starkillerOG]

Thanks for the clarification!

Very strange, I have not experianced this before.
Home Assistant handels the RTSP stream the same for the Home Hub or a directly connected camera.
Therefore I think this may be a problem in the firmware of the Home Hub or Duo 2.

Could you try out the RTSP url directly in something like VLC media player.
Then we can see if you experiance the same problems there.

[mdwhitten]

Hi, I finally came back to this. I'm hoping to get the RTSP streams working as I'd like to (on supported devices) be able to view the 4k Clear streams in browser rather than needing to use the Reolink app, as I'm already doing with the non-connected Lumus Pro.

The RTSP streams load just fine in VLC. I've been streaming using RTMP in HomeAssistant with no problems for the last two weeks. The moment that I switch the setting in HomeAssistant back to RTSP, however, all of the previously mentioned problems reappear - barely playable streams, high latency, lag, failure, etc.

I've since added an RLC-820A and a Duo 2V, so it doesn't seem particularly related to the Duo 2. It really seems to specifically be RTSP plus Home Hub plus HomeAssistant.

One thing I've noticed on my Mac is that usually the streams show without inline player controls - it says "Live Broadcast" like below

When using the struggling Home Hub RTSP streams with HomeAssistant, I see that the video never reaches the "Live" state - it always looks like it's trying to buffer to catch up to the live state or something like that. Or that somehow it doesn't understand that it is a live broadcast. I wonder if there's something off in the encoding of the RTSP stream somehow from the Home Hub?