Hey everyone, just wanted to share a little success story in case it helps someone out there pulling their hair like I was last weekend.
So, I decided to move my Aqara G4 camera off the Aqara app and into Home Assistant directly. Sounds easy, right? Spoiler: it wasn’t… but now that it’s done, it actually wasn’t that bad, either — just took some digging and trial-and-error.
Context: I’m a smart home enthusiast, not a dev or anything fancy. I’ve got a mixed setup (mostly HomeKit, a bit of Zigbee stuff with ZHA) and recently started centralizing everything on Home Assistant. I wanted local control, better automation flexibility, and honestly, I just got tired of the delays and app hopping.
Now, for the G4 — I used the RTSP stream for video, and trick was enabling the HomeKit Secure Video feed while also grabbing the stream token for HA. The docs were kind of vague, but if you set up the camera in the Aqara app FIRST, enable RTSP, grab the URL, toss it in an HA generic camera integration — boom: solid feed in the dashboard.
For motion detection and doorbell support, I couldn’t get native events so I used some automation workarounds with MQTT and Node-RED to bridge from HomeKit events (since I kept the G4 added to HomeKit) into HA. It works well enough for now until better integration lands.
If you’re thinking of making the switch — test the stream link first, and definitely take time to label everything. I learned the hard way with 3 “front door” entities showing up in different dashboards.
Let me know if you ran into similar snags or found better workarounds — always down to tweak and improve!
