I’ve been running a very simple Home Assistant setup for a while now - just a few lights and a door lock. I’ve added a bit of monitoring and data gathering basically to see how MQTT works.

I installed a Reolink camera intending to setup Frigate PVR and do all the good stuff (including more cameras) with that, but my hardware is old and I need a TPU and they’re all out of stock and back ordered until October, at best. I’ve tried ZoneMinder but couldn’t get over all the false positives with fog and rain etc. So, I had given up on my camera project for a while.

Then I installed the Reolink integration in Home Assistant and see that it has basic “AI” capability and I can trigger automations based on “person seen” etc. I already created a basic “save 30 seconds of video if you see a person”. I’ve got pretty basic requirements and can probably be happy with a few more basic automations like this, but this seems almost a waste - there is so much capability there. I had a bit of a look in the internal integrations repository and HACS and I can’t see anything that looks like a PVR.

Does it exist?

Is it something I shouldn’t be trying to do with Home Assistant? There was no noticeable increase in CPU usage when I enabled my test automation so I assume the “AI” is happening in the camera. I don’t see a downside??

Edit - I’ve continued working and reading more about the Reolink Integration and now partially answer my own question: I think I’m going to be happy with just the Reolink integration and some automations. It seems to work very well!