Ring support

A word on Ring support from @ChrisH

First of all, you need to have Ring cameras and the Ring native HA plugin and Ring-MQTT HACS addon here installed. You need to have streaming video configured using Generic Camera(s) as per instructions here and that all needs to be working.

You also need to have rights to save files in your home assistant file store somewhere. If you choose anything but the config folder you may need to permit writing to those folders. How this is done varies depending on how you run it but start here

I have got LLM Vision working with Ring cameras but the fact that they are not typical CCTV cameras and thus don’t go through a system such as Frigate presents some nuances to how compatible certain aspects of LLM Vision are with them. In short:

Images Video Streaming

The problems come from Ring not LLM Vision because of how Ring itself works. Detail below, but in summary (so far as I can tell) there is no way to get Ring to snapshot images on demand, which means that the snapshot image is useless for realtime analysis like this

Streaming doesn't work because LLM Vision relies on taking several frames from the video using entity_image attribute of the camera, rather than processing a stream of video. But the Generic Camera entity doesn’t quite work like that when created to host the ring-mqtt rtsp stream. As per the instructions you set the live stream to point at the rtsp stream exposed by the ring-mqtt addon but the snapshot attribute is pointed at the offical ring addon snapshot attribute.

And hence images doesn’t work either, because the snapshot on ring is not related to motion, it’s configured in the ring app as an image taken every x minutes regardless of activity. The camera.snapshot action has no effect as ring doesn’t have a “take snapshot” function within it (and equally therefore entity_image that LLM Vision Streaming function requires has the same limitation)

Some other pointers:

• You could call past recorded events not live stream if you want by changing the path you query from ring - see ring-mqtt docs

• Be aware that it can take a few seconds for ring video to start to live stream from the point the stream is ‘viewed’ (including using actions like camera.record). Part of this is delay in connecting to ring live streaming, some is buffering within HA itself. You can tell streaming to start using an action, which might shave a bit off that time

• Within Ring any HA live camera activity is shown as live viewing and is recorded like any other ring activity. This means it is subject to the same limitations as the Ring app in terms of duration.

• Beware if you have a battery Ring camera (or you are precious about your bandwidth) as once you start a live stream it may not always reliably stop (the forums are full of examples, but it’s unclear why it happens). You can issue a stop live stream action in HA which helps prevent this happening.

• If you want to include an image in any notification following LLM Vision being run, it’s not included in the response variable LLM Vision returns. Normally you would include a snapshot for anything else but Ring, however since Ring snapshots are periodic it’s not going to have any relevance to what was submitted for analysis by LLM Vision. As of writing I don’t know a workaround however I believe @valentinfrlch is potentially going to help Ring users as a by-product of including a debug function that can write the first submitted frame to a folder - which Ring users can use as a workaround for this problem as that frame can be our notification image we can’t otherwise get.