**Important** Streaming behavior with Home Assistant >2024.11

[tsightler]

So, Home Assistant has struck again with new changes which make use with ring-mqtt more annoying. With the release of Home Assistant 2024.11 the core services now includes WebRTC support natively and thus no longer requires the use of the go2rtc addon and rtps_to_webrtc integration to get low-latency stream and fast startup for streams on demand.

Overall, this is great, however, this is one downside to the new implementation, for some reason, they way HA decided to implement this was to start he HLS stream and the WebRTC stream in parallel. In theory this is fine, the WebRTC stream is still the stream that is displayed, however, unlike the WebRTC stream, which will shutdown with 5 seconds after interactive viewing is stopped, the stream component will keep the connection alive for 5 minutes.

For battery cameras, this extra 5 minutes of streaming has a very negative impact on battery life and, even worse, since most Ring cameras do not send motion notifications while streaming (I guess they assume there's no reason for a notification if you are watching the stream), this can potentially lead to loss of motion notifications as well.

So far, the only workaround I've found is to not use the native picture cards in HA for video streams, you can use custom cards that support WebRTC natively such as the WebRTC card and Frigate card (using Frigate is not required). These cards are very nice and flexible, the Frigate card is particularly easy to configure in the UI and has a lot of nice options, but it has some disadvantages vs the native picture glance card in that you can't easily add overlays showing the status of camera sensors, etc. This can be overcome by simply adding these sensors in other sections of the HA UI, but I still find this a pretty decent negative.

I've opened an issue, I have limited hope that the HA devs might eventually address this, but, for right now, it seems to be "by design".