Home Assistant Dahua Integration

The Dahua Home Assistant integration allows you to integrate your Dahua cameras, doorbells, NVRs, DVRs in Home Assistant. It's also confirmed to work with some Lorex cameras and Amcrest devices.

Supports motion events, alarm events (and others), enabling/disabling motion detection, switches for infrared, illuminator (white light), security lights (red/blue flashers), sirens, doorbell button press events, and more.

Also exposes several services to enable/disable motion detection or set the text overlay on the video.

NOTE: Using the switch to turn on/off the infrared light will disable the "auto" mode. Use the service to enable auto mode again (or the camera UI).

Why not use the Amcrest integration already provided by Home Assistant? The Amcrest integration is missing features that this integration provides and I want an integration that is branded as Dahua. Amcrest are rebranded Dahua cams. With this integration living outside of HA, it can be developed faster and released more often. HA has release schedules and rigerous review processes which I'm not ready for while developing this integration. Once this integration is mature I'd like to move it into HA directly.

Installation

If you want live-streaming, make sure to add the following to your config.yaml:

ffmpeg:

See ffmpeg and stream.

HACS install

To install with HACS:

1. Click on HACS in the Home Assistant menu
2. Click on Integrations
3. Click the EXPLORE & ADD REPOSITORIES button
4. Search for Dahua
5. Click the INSTALL THIS REPOSITORY IN HACS button
6. Restart Home Assistant
7. Configure the camera by going to Configurations -> Integrations -> ADD INTERATIONS button, search for Dahua and configure the camera.

Manual install

To manually install:

# Download a copy of this repository
$ wget https://github.com/rroller/dahua/archive/dahua-main.zip

# Unzip the archive
$ unzip dahua-main.zip

# Move the dahua directory into your custom_components directory in your Home Assistant install
$ mv dahua-main/custom_components/dahua <home-assistant-install-directory>/config/custom_components/

⚠️ After executing one of the above installation methods, restart Home Assistant. Also clear your browser cache before proceeding to the next step, as the integration may not be visible otherwise.

Setup

1. Now the integration is added to HACS and available in the normal HA integration installation, so...
2. In the HA left menu, click Configuration
3. Click Integrations
4. Click ADD INTEGRATION
5. Type Dahua and select it
6. Enter the details:
   1. Username: Your camera's username
   2. Password: Your camera's password
   3. Address: Your camera's address, typically just the IP address
   4. Port: Your camera's HTTP port. Default is 80
   5. RTSP Port: Your camera's RTSP port, default is 554. Used to live stream your camera in HA
   6. Events: The integration will keep a connection open to the camera to capture motion events, alarm events, etc. You can select which events you want to monitor and report in HA. If no events are selected then the connection will no be created. If you want a specific event that's not listed here open an issue and I'll add it.

NOTE: All streams will be added, even if not enabled in the camera. Just remove the ones you don't want.

Known supported cameras

This integration should word with most Dahua cameras and doorbells. It has been tested with very old and very new Dahua cameras.

Doorbells will have a binary sensor that captures the doorbell pressed event.

• Please let me know if you've tested with additional cameras

These devices are confirmed as working:

Dahua cameras

Other brand cameras

^* partial support

Doorbell cameras

Known Issues

• IPC-D2B20-ZS doesn't work. Needs a wrapper, 7, 8

Events

Events are streamed from the device and fired on the Home Assistant event bus.

Here's example event data:

{
    "event_type": "dahua_event_received",
    "data": {
        "name": "Cam13",
        "Code": "VideoMotion",
        "action": "Start",
        "index": "0",
        "data": {
            "Id": [
                0
            ],
            "RegionName": [
                "Region1"
            ],
            "SmartMotionEnable": false
        },
        "DeviceName": "Cam13"
    },
    "origin": "LOCAL",
    "time_fired": "2021-06-30T04:00:28.605290+00:00",
    "context": {
        "id": "199542fe3f404f2a0a81031ee495bdd1",
        "parent_id": null,
        "user_id": null
    }
}

And here's how you configure and event trigger in an automation:

platform: event
event_type: dahua_event_received
event_data:
  name: Cam13
  Code: VideoMotion
  action: Start

And that's it! You can enable debug logging (See at the end of this readme) to print out events to the Home Assisant log as they fire. That can help you understand the events. Or you can HA and open Developer Tools -> Events -> and under "Listen to events" enter dahua_event_received and then click "Start Listening" and wait for events to fire (you might need to walk in front of your cam to make motion events fire, or press a button, etc)

Example Code Events

BackKeyLight States

Services and Entities

Note for ease of use, the integration tries to determine if your device supports certain services, entities and will conditionally add them. But that's sometimes a little hard so it'll just add the entity even if your devices doesn't support. I'd rather opt into extra entities than to create a complicated flow to determine what's supported and what isn't. You can simply disable the entities you don't want. An example of this is the "door open state" for doorbells. Not all doorbells support this.

Services

Camera

This will provide a normal HA camera entity (can take snapshots, etc)

Switches

Lights

Binary Sensors

Local development

If you wish to work on this component, the easiest way is to follow HACS Dev Container README. In short:

• Install Docker
• Install Visual Studio Code
• Install the devcontainer Visual Code plugin
• Clone this repo and open it in Visual Studio Code
• View -> Command Palette. Type Tasks: Run Task and select it, then click Run Home Assistant on port 9123
• Open Home Assistant at http://localhost:9123

Debugging

Add to your configuration.yaml:

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    custom_components.dahua: debug

Curl/HTTP commands

# Stream events
curl -s --digest -u admin:$DAHUA_PASSWORD  "http://192.168.1.203/cgi-bin/eventManager.cgi?action=attach&codes=[All]&heartbeat=5"

# List IVS rules
http://192.168.1.203/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=getConfig&name=VideoAnalyseRule

# Enable/Disable IVS rules for [0][3] ... 0 is the channel, 3 is the rule index. Use the right index as required
http://192.168.1.203/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&VideoAnalyseRule[0][3].Enable=false

# Enable/disable Audio Linkage for an IVS rule
http://192.168.1.203/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&VideoAnalyseRule[0][3].EventHandler.VoiceEnable=false

References and thanks

• Thanks to @elad-ba for his work on https://github.com/elad-bar/DahuaVTO2MQTT which was copied and modified and then used here for VTO devices
• Thanks for the DAHUA_HTTP_API_V2.76.pdf API reference found at http://www.ipcamtalk.com
• Thanks to all the people opening issues, reporting bugs, pasting commands, etc