Dashboard Stream Cam - Home Assistant App Repository

Turn any Home Assistant dashboard into an authenticated network camera: an RTSP stream plus an ONVIF device/media service with WS-Discovery, so NVR software - most notably UniFi Protect, which supports adding third-party cameras via ONVIF/RTSP - can add it exactly like a physical camera.

What this is

This repository is a Home Assistant App repository (Home Assistant renamed "Add-ons" to "Apps" in Supervisor 2026.07; both terms refer to the same mechanism and this repository installs the same way either way). It contains one app, dashboard_stream/, which:

• renders a dashboard you pick headlessly (Chromium in a virtual framebuffer),
• captures and encodes it (ffmpeg) to an RTSP stream plus a smaller substream (mediamtx), the way a real camera offers main and sub streams,
• exposes a minimal ONVIF device/media service and WS-Discovery responder so it is discoverable and addable as a third-party ONVIF camera,
• gates the stream, ONVIF service and snapshot endpoint behind a username/password, matching what UniFi Protect expects when adding a third-party camera,
• lets you pick which dashboard is streamed from a live dropdown in the app's own web panel,
• supervises itself at three levels (per-process s6 supervision, an internal render-hang watchdog, and a Supervisor-level container watchdog) and logs everything to the app's Log tab.

Full setup instructions, the UniFi Protect integration walkthrough, the configuration reference and troubleshooting live in dashboard_stream/DOCS.md (also shown in the app's Documentation tab once installed).

Installation

1. In Home Assistant: Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store (or Settings → Apps → App Store) → the three-dot menu → Repositories.
2. Add this repository's URL: https://github.com/internerd/ha-dashboard-stream
3. Install Dashboard Stream Cam from the store. It builds directly from this repository's Dockerfile - no external container registry, account, or extra setup is required beyond adding the URL above.

Repository layout

repository.yaml          Home Assistant app-repository manifest
dashboard_stream/        the app itself (config.yaml, Dockerfile, app code, docs)
.github/                 issue/PR templates, CI
AI_POLICY.md             how AI assistance was used in this repository, and the
                          contribution policy around it
NOTICE.md                third-party software, specs and trademark attributions
SECURITY.md              supported versions, vulnerability reporting, and the
                          security trade-offs this app makes (read before deploying)
PRIVACY.md               privacy policy / Datenschutzerklärung (EN + DE)
DISCLAIMER.md            liability disclaimer / Haftungsausschluss (EN + DE)
LICENSE                  Apache License 2.0

Legal & attribution

• Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
• Third-party components, specifications and trademarks used by this project are listed with attribution in NOTICE.md.
• This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Open Home Foundation / Home Assistant, Ubiquiti Inc. (UniFi Protect), ONVIF, or Google (Chromium). Product names are used solely to describe compatibility. See DISCLAIMER.md for the full liability disclaimer, including the legal considerations that apply if your dashboard embeds real camera feeds that end up recorded by your NVR software.
• This is self-hosted software with no telemetry, analytics, or phone-home of any kind - see PRIVACY.md (bilingual EN/DE) for exactly what data the app touches and who is the GDPR/DSGVO data controller for your own instance (you are).
• See AI_POLICY.md for how generative AI was used to produce this repository's code and documentation, and the policy for AI-assisted contributions.

A note on HACS

This repository is not, and cannot be, a HACS repository. HACS only distributes integration, plugin (Lovelace frontend), theme, python_script, appdaemon and template repositories - Supervisor Add-ons/Apps like this one are explicitly a different, separate mechanism with their own store, which is exactly what repository.yaml and dashboard_stream/config.yaml in this repo implement (see Installation above). Adding a hacs.json here wouldn't do anything - HACS would refuse to index this repository. If a future version of this project ships a companion Lovelace card or integration, that piece could reasonably become HACS-installable, and would get its own hacs.json at that point.

Contributing

Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are welcome - see CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and AI_POLICY.md first.