camera.ui

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Dashboard cards ​

The camera.ui integration ships two custom Lovelace cards for your Home Assistant dashboards:

  • camera.ui Card. A single-camera live view.
  • camera.ui Grid. A grid of live tiles, click any tile to go live.

Both cards stream through Home Assistant, show a snapshot poster until you go live, and expose resolution, transport and PTZ controls for cameras that support them.

camera.ui single-camera card with a live stream and player controls

Before you start ​

Set up the camera.ui integration first. When the integration loads, it serves the card bundle and registers it as a Lovelace resource for you. There is no manual resource step: the cards are available in the card picker as soon as the integration is running.[1]

Add a card ​

  1. Open a dashboard and choose Edit dashboard, then Add card.
  2. In the card picker, search for camera.ui Card or camera.ui Grid.
  3. Pick the card, set the entity (or the camera list for the grid), and save.

You can also add a card in YAML mode. The card type: values are cameraui-card and cameraui-grid-card.

The single card checks its entity and shows an inline message instead of a stream when something is off: No entity configured, Entity not found, or Not a camera.ui camera entity if the entity isn't a camera.ui camera. The grid card skips any entity it can't resolve and shows No cameras configured when none are left.

camera.ui Card ​

The single-camera card. entity is required.

yaml
type: cameraui-card
entity: camera.front_door
title: Front Door
source: high-resolution
mode: auto
autostart: false
snapshot_interval: 10

Options:

  • entity. Required. The camera.ui camera entity to show.
  • title. Overlay title. Defaults to the entity's friendly name or camera name.
  • source. Which resolution role to start on: high-resolution, mid-resolution or low-resolution. Defaults to high-resolution.
  • mode. Streaming transport: auto, webrtc or mse. Defaults to auto, which picks WebRTC or MSE for you.
  • autostart. Go live immediately instead of showing the poster first. Defaults to false.
  • snapshot_interval. How often the snapshot poster refreshes, in seconds. Defaults to 10, minimum 2.

camera.ui Grid ​

The grid card shows several cameras as live tiles. cameras is required.

yaml
type: cameraui-grid-card
cameras:
  - camera.front_door
  - camera.driveway
  - camera.garden
columns: 3
source: high-resolution
mode: auto
autostart: false

Options:

  • cameras. Required. A list of camera.ui camera entity ids.
  • columns. Number of columns. When you leave it out, the grid uses 1 column for a single camera, 2 for up to four, and 3 above that.
  • source, mode, autostart. Same meaning as on the single card, applied to every tile.

Streaming ​

The card shows a snapshot poster until you go live. A small badge in the bottom-left corner shows how old the snapshot is (now, seconds, minutes or hours). Click the play button, or set autostart: true, to open the live stream.

The live stream runs through the streaming engine over WebRTC or MSE, proxied through Home Assistant so nothing needs to be exposed directly. With mode: auto the card picks the transport; the mode pill lets you cycle AUTO → WebRTC → MSE while watching. H.265 cameras are supported too.[2]

When a camera has more than one resolution role, a resolution pill switches between HD, MD and SD. Controls appear on hover: pause and play, mute, picture-in-picture, and fullscreen. Narrow cards hide the extra controls to keep the video clear.[3]

PTZ controls ​

Cameras that expose PTZ get an on-video overlay when the card is wide enough: a zoom slider on the left and a pan/tilt pad on the right. Holding a control sends a continuous move; releasing stops it. If the camera has a home preset, tapping the pad sends it home. The overlay only shows the controls the camera actually supports.

camera.ui card with the PTZ overlay showing a zoom slider and a pan and tilt pad

Under the hood the overlay calls the cameraui.ptz service, so you can drive the same camera from your own automations.

What the cards do not do ​

The cards are live view only. They do not draw detection boxes or object-sensor badges, and there is no recordings or events timeline inside the card. For object sensors, device triggers and the cameraui_event bus event, see the integration page.

Next steps ​

  1. In storage-mode dashboards the integration creates or updates the Lovelace resource with a content-hashed URL. In YAML-mode dashboards it injects the script for the session instead. Either way, you do not add a resource by hand. ↩︎

  2. The stream backend is go2rtc, proxied through Home Assistant. Codec handling, including H.265, lives in the shared streaming component the card embeds. ↩︎

  3. The pills hide below 300px card width, picture-in-picture below 260px, mute below 200px, and the PTZ overlay needs at least 340px. ↩︎