Uniview + Home Assistant
Uniview camera alerts in Home Assistant
Uniview cameras can email when they see something, but they can't reach Home Assistant on their own. NVR Bridge sits in between and does the translation. There are two ways in: publish to the Mosquitto add-on over MQTT, or fire a webhook automation trigger. Either way the snapshot arrives as a URL you can drop straight into a notification or a picture card. No Uniview NVR and no extra licence — the camera does this on its own.
- You need
- A Uniview camera that can email, plus Home Assistant with the Mosquitto add-on or a webhook automation trigger
- Setup
- About five minutes, all in a browser — no firmware changes
- What arrives
- An MQTT message or a webhook payload, with the snapshot as a fetchable URL
How it works
- 1
Add the camera
Create a camera in NVR Bridge and it gets its own private inbound address, something like k7m2p9@relay.nvrbridge.com. That address is how we know which camera an event came from.
- 2
Point Uniview at it
In the camera's web UI, go to Setup → Network → Email, then enable email under Alarm → the event you want. Set the recipient to the address above, and use our SMTP server and short password — or your own mail provider, if you'd rather.
- 3
Choose MQTT or a webhook
Running the Mosquitto add-on? Add an MQTT notification pointing at it — over an SSH tunnel if Home Assistant isn't exposed. Prefer automations? Create a webhook trigger, copy its URL, and add a webhook notification that posts to it.
- 4
Trigger it
Walk past the camera. The event lands on your timeline within seconds and the Home Assistant alert follows. Every delivery is logged with its result, so a failure is something you can read rather than guess at.
What you get
- Works whether or not Home Assistant is reachable from the internet
- The snapshot arrives as a URL, ready for a notify service or a picture card
- Filter to a person, a vehicle, an animal or one number plate before it ever reaches HA
- No custom component, no HACS repository, nothing to keep updated
- Works with every Uniview model that can send email or upload by FTP
- Optional number-plate, object and animal detection — alert only when it's a person
Questions
Does Home Assistant need to be exposed to the internet?
Not for the MQTT route. We connect out to an SSH host on your network and publish to the broker over the tunnel. The webhook route does need a reachable URL — Nabu Casa or your own reverse proxy.
Can I put the picture in the notification?
Yes. The payload carries a direct link to the snapshot, which both the mobile app's image attribute and a picture card will render without any further work.
Which Uniview models does this work with?
Any model with email or FTP alert settings, which is effectively all of them. We don't need ONVIF, RTSP or a particular firmware version. Uniview cameras will happily send to an external address, which is all we need — no extra licence, no NVR module.
Do I need an NVR, a recorder or something running at home?
No. The camera talks to us over the same outbound connection it already uses to send email. There's nothing to install on your network and no inbound port to open.
Try it with your own camera
Add a camera, point its email at the address we give you, and watch the first event land. It takes about five minutes.
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