Home Assistant ANNKE integration – ONVIF & RTSP

I have my hands on the ANNKE NC400 camera and I will try Home Assistant ANNKE integration using ONVIF & RTSP.

ANNKE NC400 Camera

The guys from ANNKE send me the ANNKE NC400 camera for free for a test and review and I’m really thankful for that. No matter the nice gift this will be an honest review and everything that you will see here is my own and real opinion.

With that being said let’s take a look at the ANNKE NC400 camera specification quickly. Afterwards we will see that true full color night vision and Home Assistant integration in action.

Let’s go.

ANNKE NC400 specification and features

The ANNKE NC400 camera brings innovation to video surveillance with its unique true full color night vision. The camera also support ONVIF & RTSP which means it will be able to work with third-party software and NVRs seamlessly.

This camera is providing a resolution of 4MP @ 20 frames per second.
It supports H.265 and H.264 video compression which is pretty good, because if you are using the H.265+ you will be able to save bandwidth and to store more camera footage on less disk space.

The Horizontal Field of View (FoV) is 102 degrees and vertical is 54 degrees.
Minimal illumination required for the true full color night vision is 0.001 lux with a range of up to 30 meters.

The waterproof rating is IP67, which means you can mount it outdoors if the operating temperature is between -30 and +60 degrees Celsius.
The camera is made of metal.

Later in the article I will test the true full color night vision and I will integrate the camera to Home Assistant.

Where to buy?

If you want to buy that camera you can use my affiliate link below where I will receive a small commission from your purchase with no additional cost for you:

ANNKE NC400 4MP True Full Color Night Vision (official store affiliate link) – http://shrsl.com/3bfem

ANNKE NC400 True Full Color Night Vision

We now know the camera specification, let’s see how the ANNKE NC400 performs in day and night. I’m dying to see that true full color night vision even in complete darkness.

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You can see in the pictures above that colors during the night are really visible, especially if there is some kind of street lightning. In complete darkness (or close to that) there are also some visible colors, which is something that I honestly didn’t expect and I thought it is just a marketing trick. It seems to me that the true full color night vision is actually working, what do you think?

Question For You!

I have a question for you that I hope you will answer with at least simple yes or no. And the question is do you think that true full color night vision feature is useful?

ANNKE NC400 Initial setup

I will not go into details here as the process is easy and straightforward. Here are the few major steps that you have to follow:

• Connect the camera to your Internal Network. The best will be to use Power Over Ethernet (PoE) to power it up, otherwise you have to find a power supply.
• If you want to use a mobile device for the initial setup – download Annke Vision from either App Store or Google Play. Start it and follow the instructions.
• If you want to use desktop go to the ANNKE download center and download either SADP tool for your OS or Desktop Software.

The important part here is that your mobile or desktop device and the camera should be in the same network.

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Home Assistant ANNKE Integration

Time to test that ONVIF & RTSP support and what’s better tool than Home Assistant for that? Some may say Blue Iris, motionEye and other usual suspects, but that is trivial it will work with these guys for sure.

I prefer to integrate the ANNKE NC400 with Home Assistant, so I can open the possibility for automations. Let’s see what will happen, starting with RTSP and then we will continue with ONVIF.

Home Assistant ANNKE over RTSP

To add a RTSP camera to Home Assistant you will need a RTSP link and camera credentials. Below are the main and sub RTSP links for the ANNKE NC400 camera that are working for me:

• rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554/H264/ch1/main/av_stream
• rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554/H264/ch1/sub/av_stream

The first RTSP link is the main stream with full quality and resolution. The second one is the sub stream with restricted quality and resolution.

The admin is the username, smash-the-like is the password – you should change these with yours credentials that you used during the initial setup of the ANNKE NC400 camera. Finally 10.0.0.56 is the IP of the ANNKE camera – you have to change that with yours.

To test if your RTSP link is correct and working – download and install VLC player.

If you see the camera stream in VLC – you are in the game and you can try the Home Assistant ANNKE integration over RTSP described below.

Using the FFMPEG for the RTSP stream

To display the RTSP stream in Home Assistant we will use the ffmpeg platform.

If you are using the Home Assistant supervised on a Raspberry Pi or Home Assistant OS you will have ffmpeg preinstalled. If you are running Home Assistant Core in a Python environment, you’ll need to add the ffmpeg binary in your system path. 

When you sort the ffmpeg out, open your configuration.yaml file and add the following section:

# configuration.yaml entry
camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: ANNKE_NC400_sub
    # substream = small window
    input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554/H264/ch1/sub/av_stream 
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: ANNKE_NC400_main
    # main stream = big window
    input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://admin:[email protected]:554/H264/ch1/main/av_stream 

Save the file, check the Home Assistant configuration and restart the Home Assistant.

If everything is Okay the only thing that you should do is to add the new camera entities (RTSP streams) to your Home Assistant Lovelace.

Home Assistant ANNKE with ONVIF

RTSP protocol is working fine, but ONVIF is what I really want to test as the camera sensors may appear in Home Assistant. This will open Home Automation possibilities that we are all looking for.

Let’s see the Home Assistant ANNKE NC400 and ONVIF.

First you have to enable ONVIF in your ANNKE NC400 camera. To do that go to your Camera settings using the ANNKE SADP tool for example and log in.

When logged in, please go to the Configuration–>Network–>Advance Setting–>Integration Protocol. Enable the “Onvif” and create an Onvif account. Remember the username and password as you will need them below.

You will then have to enter a Name, Host (the IP of the camera) and Port. In my case because the Home Assistant and ANNKE camera were in the same network – Home Assistant autocomplete the Name, Host and Port part.

When you enter everything click Submit, and you will be asked for your ONVIF username and password. Enter the ONVIF username and password that you created above and you have to see something similar at the end.

Add ONVIF camera to Home Assistant Dashboard

After the successful Home Assistant ANNKE integration using ONVIF you can go to the dashboard of your Home Assistant you will see your camera stream already added as card.

If you don’t see a camera stream, you can add a Picture Glance Card and choose the entities from the ONVIF integration in the card configuration.

Home Assistant ANNKE automations

Okay, ANNKE NC400 ONVIF support is working. I have several camera sensors now in Home Assistant and I can try some automations.

Unfortunately, the motion sensors of the camera are not working in Home Assistant for some reason and their state is always “Clear” no matter what you do.

I guess this will be fixed in some future Home Assistant release, until then the automation below can be tested by manually change the motion sensor state from Clear to something else like Motion using Home Assistant Developer Tools.

Add this in your automations.yaml using your favorite editor.

# automations.yaml entry
- id: '1610646256178'
  alias: Motion detected by ANNKE
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.mymotiondetectorrule_cell_motion_detection
    from: Clear
    to: Motion
  condition: []
  action:
  - service: notify.telegram
    data:
      message: motion is detected
  mode: single

You should change the binary_sensor.mymotiondetectorrule_cell_motion_detection with yours motion sensor and – service: notify.telegram with notification service of your choice.

ANNKE NC400 Final Thoughts

In my opinion the most interesting feature in the ANNKE NC400 is the true full color night vision. It can help to easily identify colors, clothes, cars and other things that simply will be not visible at all from Black & White night footage coming from other cameras lacking this feature. The other big advantage is the RTSP & ONVIF support that will allow any third party software integration.

On the other hand the camera motion sensors are not working in Home Assistant when you are using ONVIF, but this is something that can be caused by Home Assistant, ANNKE or both and I hope it will be fixed in the future.

Also few more pixels in this camera would be a great addition, but I’m fully aware that this will inevitably reflect on the price.

Overall – good job ANNKE!

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I really hope that you find this information useful and you now know more about the ANNKE NC400, Home Assistant, ONVIF, RTSP and true full color night vision.

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