HA – record video when doorbell rings + recording gallery + auto-delete old recordings

I have an EUFY video doorbell (but this should work with any HA supported doorbell) and also several Tapo C310 and EzViz cams.
Whenever these camera’s trigger a motion (or button push from the doorbell), it starts recording video for about 1 minute, and store them on the HA internal disc
(or mounted NAS or so …)
On connected devices, it will popup a screen, with a live-view of the camera that triggered the motion, and this popup will also disappear after one minute.
Also, I have an automation running that deletes old recordings (you can set retain-period), so you don’t have to do this manually.
And of course, we have a separate recording-view in our HA, on which we can browse/play previous recordings, accompanied with the timestamp and type of camera (front/back/doorbell …)

1. Prerequisites:
-You will need to install a plugin for you camera(s), this installation depends on the brand/type of camera you use. Look in the Home assistant forums for help on this.
– You need to install “custom:gallery-card” and also need to setup “the files component” and configure your “media source”. Look here for installation: https://github.com/TarheelGrad1998/gallery-card

2. My configuration:
I did setup the following media source, within my configuration.yaml:
(Those files need to be in the WWW subfolder, otherwise they will not be accessible from the web-interface !)

  media_dirs:
    local: /media
    cameras: /config/www/cameras

I reboot my HA-instance every night, I have an automation that does this, and inside this automation, I also call a script to delete old camera-files.
This is done with the following automation in my configuration.yaml:
-The /config/www/cameras, correspond to the definition in the media-source.
-The 20, indicates to delete all files that are older then 20 days. (Replace this with a number to your likings)

delete_old_camera_files: find /config/www/cameras/* -mtime +20 -exec rm {} \;

Furthermore, there are the automations itself, for the camera/doorbell.
Simply add a trigger for motion detection on the camera, and doorbell press, and add the following “logic” in the action:

if:
  - condition: trigger
    id: cam_XXX
then:
  - service: camera.record
    data:
      filename: >-
        /config/www/cameras/{{ now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d - %H:%M:%S")}} - cam XXX.mp4
      duration: 60
    target:
      entity_id: camera.camera_XXX
  - service: browser_mod.more_info
    data:
      entity: camera.camera_XXX
      large: true
      ignore_popup_card: false
  - service: media_player.play_media
    data:
      enqueue: play
      media_content_type: music
      media_content_id: /local/sounds/notification_camera.mp3
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.kitchen_google_home_mini
  - service: camera.play_stream
    data:
      media_player: media_player.nesthub_bedroom_kris
    target:
      entity_id: camera.camera_XXX
  - service: camera.play_stream
    data:
      media_player: media_player.nesthub_bedroom_christel
    target:
      entity_id: camera.camera_XXX
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 55
      milliseconds: 0
  - service: media_player.media_stop
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id:
        - media_player.nesthub_bedroom_kris
        - media_player.nesthub_bedroom_christel
  - service: media_player.turn_off
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id:
        - media_player.nesthub_bedroom_kris
        - media_player.nesthub_bedroom_christel
  - service: browser_mod.close_popup
    data: {}

What this automation does:
– Start the recording (for 60 seconds), based on a trigger of camera_XXX in the media-source folder, with a timestamp and camera ID in the filename.
– Put a large live-view of the camera, on every registered screen in browser_mod.
– Play a notification sound, on the google nest in our kitchen.
– Play the livestream on the 2 nest hub screen we have in the bedroom. (one on each side of the bed)
– After one minute, stop the camera recording, and close all live-views. (both the ones via browser_mod and the google nest hub screens)

3. The recording view
To get a preview-list with all recordings (like in the first screen), simply add a custom card, with the following definition:

type: custom:gallery-card
title: null
parsed_date_sort: true
caption_leading_zeros: true
show_reload: false
entities:
  - path: media-source://media_source/cameras/
maximum_files: '50'
menu_alignment: left
card_mod:
  style: |
    ha-card {
      color: #FFFFFF;    
      font-size: 12px;
      aspect-ratio: 9/5
    }

This will show the last 50 recordings from the “media-source”-folder, the most recent op top, showing the list on the left … 🙂