**Important** Streaming behavior with Home Assistant >2024.11

[tsightler]

So, Home Assistant has struck again with new changes which make use with ring-mqtt more annoying. With the release of Home Assistant 2024.11 the core services now includes WebRTC support natively and thus no longer requires the use of the go2rtc addon and rtps_to_webrtc integration to get low-latency stream and fast startup for streams on demand.

Overall, this is great, however, this is one downside to the new implementation, for some reason, they way HA decided to implement this was to start he HLS stream and the WebRTC stream in parallel. In theory this is fine, the WebRTC stream is still the stream that is displayed, however, unlike the WebRTC stream, which will shutdown with 5 seconds after interactive viewing is stopped, the stream component will keep the connection alive for 5 minutes.

For battery cameras, this extra 5 minutes of streaming has a very negative impact on battery life and, even worse, since most Ring cameras do not send motion notifications while streaming (I guess they assume there's no reason for a notification if you are watching the stream), this can potentially lead to loss of motion notifications as well.

So far, the only workaround I've found is to not use the native picture cards in HA for video streams, you can use custom cards that support WebRTC natively such as the WebRTC card and Frigate card (using Frigate is not required). These cards are very nice and flexible, the Frigate card is particularly easy to configure in the UI and has a lot of nice options, but it has some disadvantages vs the native picture glance card in that you can't easily add overlays showing the status of camera sensors, etc. This can be overcome by simply adding these sensors in other sections of the HA UI, but I still find this a pretty decent negative.

I've opened an issue, I have limited hope that the HA devs might eventually address this, but, for right now, it seems to be "by design".

[TheNightmanX]

@tsightler could you please give me an example of the configuration to use a frigate card / advanced camera card ? I tried to use it with my ring cam but did not succeed. Thank you. 😃

[tsightler]

What problem did you have? I mean, there's not much to it, select the camera entities you want to use with the card and that's it, works like any other camera.

[TheNightmanX]

@tsightler Thank you for the reply. I have created a generic cam in HA and when I use this in the frigate/custopm cam card then the stream stays open for 5 minutes, too. I thought that there is a workaround the 5 min. problem by using the frigate/custom cam card. What do I make or think wrong?

Cam config: (Cam is running fine when entering in the card, but 5 min. problem occures)
Standbild URL: http://homeassistant.local:8123{{ states.camera.cam_garten_snapshot.attributes.entity_picture }}
Stream URL: rtsp://03cabcc9-ring-mqtt:8554/649a631b3da8_live
RTSP Protocol: nothing selected
Authentification: basic
Username/Password: entered
Bildfrequenz: 20
No other checkboxes checked.

[MyPiLife]

@tsightler @TheNightmanX Same issue here. Created a generic CAM in HD and trying to use the Frigate (Now called advanced camera card) Missing something here. Can we user the Frigate card without setting up a Generic cam in HA. Every way I've tried has not worked trying to just add a RTSP feed into the Frigate card alone. I'm I missing something here. Any examples appreciated.

[MyPiLife]

Have this working in WebRTC card. Works great on only keeping the feed open as long as it needs.

Issue is how does one use this in an automation with there is no camera entity to use camera record action?

[tsightler]

Good news on this, with Home Assistant 2025.7 the stream timeout should be down to 30 seconds, which is much more tolerable!