A couple of years ago, I purchased a Vstarcam C93 web-cam. It was relatively inexpensive and worked as a remote camera with motion sensing and local SD card storage. However, I often ran into connection issues with the manufacturer’s own app. I thought I might have better luck running it as a streaming camera from Home Assistant.

Vstarcam has a utility called IP Camera Finder (download from https://www.vstarcam.com/software-download). It allows me to find the web-cam’s streaming endpoint, and supports assigning a static IP and port number for the device. Using the utility, I set the C39 static IP address to 192.168.1.222, and arbitrary set the port number to 22222. With these settings, the camera streaming endpoint becomes http://192.168.1.222:22222/videostream.cgi?user=admin&pwd=”password”.

If the web-cam is used within your local network, and the privacy of the video feed is not a concern, then a live video feed can be added to Home Assistant dashboard by adding a picture card with the following image URL:

http://192.168.1.222:22222/videostream.cgi?user=admin&pwd="password"

If you want to access the camera over the Internet, encrypting the video feed is highly recommended. I’ll look into this in a future post.