Google Assistant Camera Feeds

As mentioned in a previous post I’ve been playing with Streaming Camera feeds to my Chromecast.

The next step is to enabling accessing these feeds via the Google Assistant. To do this I’m extending my Node-RED Google Assistant Service.

You should now be able to add a device with the type Camera and a CameraStream trait. You can then ask the Google Assistant to “OK Google, show me View Camera on the Livingroom TV”

This will create an input message in Node-RED that looks like:

{
  "topic": "",
  "name": "View Camera",
  "payload": {
    "command": "action.devices.commands.GetCameraStream",
    "params": {
      "StreamToChromecast": true,
      "SupportedStreamProtocols": [
        "progressive_mp4",
        "hls",
        "dash",
        "smooth_stream"
      ],
      "online": true
    }
  }
}

The important part is mainly the SupportedStreamProtocols which shows the types of video stream the display device supports. In this case because the target is a ChromeCast it shows the full list.

Since we need to reply with a URL pointing to the stream the Node-RED input node can not be set to Auto Acknowledge and must be wired to a Response node.

The function node updates the msg.payload.params with the required details. In this case

msg.payload.params = {
    cameraStreamAccessUrl: "http://192.168.1.96:8080/hls/stream.m3u8",
    cameraStreamProtocol: "hls"
}
return msg;

It needs to include the cameraStreamAccessUrl which points to the video stream and the cameraStreamProtocol which identifies which of the requested protocols the stream uses.

This works well when the cameras and the Chromecast are on the same network, but if you want to access remote cameras then you will want to make sure that they are secured to prevent them being scanned by a IoT search engine like Shodan and open to the world.