7.0.0 🎥 1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣ • 0️⃣ • 0️⃣

New Features

Stream on battery, solar & hub devices

Integration now supports video stream through proprietary TP-Link protocol - called Direct stream. These Direct stream camera entities will automatically show up as enabled HD (Direct) and SD (Direct) (disabled by default), if RTSP streaming is not available for your camera.
If you have RTSP entities already, Direct entities will be disabled by default, but can be manually enabled.

🔥 If you did not have camera entities before this release, now you do. Make sure to DISABLE Use Stream from Home Assistant (restart required) in integration options for the fastest experience and the best battery life. 🔥

Why use the new streams?

1. If you have a device which does not have RTSP functionality, you now have a stream in HA. This includes battery devices, solar devices, as well as devices working through a hub. 🤯
2. If you have used up all your RTSP streams and/or your RTSP streams are unstable in Home Assistant.
3. They are extremely fast to load and have less than a half a second delay in stream* (*make sure to DISABLE Use Stream from Home Assistant (restart required) in integration options for the fastest experience and best battery life). Measured delay is lower than RTSP with go2rtc. Under the hood, the new streams are a binary stream of data "straight to your browser", with no unnecessary translations or overhead.

Why not use the new Direct streams?

If you have an option to use RTSP, consider sticking with RTSP streams.

1. Direct streams take a bit more CPU resources since the device running this integration is now handling the binary stream directly, instead of camera exposing a standardized RTSP stream.
2. Direct streams cannot be used with webrtc card, or go2rtc.
3. RTSP streams are very fast with almost no delay with webrtc camera card

Recording downloads on battery, solar & hub devices & Media Sync

Similarly to streams, recorded videos can now be viewed inside Home Assistant on all cameras out there, including solar, battery, or hub devices.

They can be also automatically synced using the Media Sync.

Fixes

• Fix #1006: Edge case where adding a camera failed
• Fix #1001: Edge case where reloading an integration required Home Assistant restart

Breaking Changes

If you are using media-source paths for example in Dashboard, they have changed. You will need to update the paths based on the new format.

Thank you

• @GracefulTabby for initial research & code on recordings download for hub devices
• @rivergo1d for sharing his D230 doorbell with me allowing me to quickly test all the changes