Starling Hub for Home Assistant – lightyears better than the Nest integration

TL;DR: If you have Google Nest cameras (or cameras that Google Home supports but Home Assistant doesn’t) that you’re keen to get into Home Assistant, I’d strongly consider the Starling Hub.

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Coming from an Apple / Google Ecosystem prior to my Home Assistant days, I invested in a Starling hub to get my Google Nest cameras into HomeKit.

Since embarking on my Home Assistant journey, I’ve still been importing my cameras into Home Assistant via the HomeKit Bridge Integration (Starling > HomeKit > Home Assistant) as well as the Google Nest integration. This resulted in some pretty ordinary, jumpy video (I assume it just had to jump through too many hoops to get to Home Assistant).

While scrolling through the Starling app today after doing a firmware update, I discovered that it is capable of streaming the Nest cameras locally (caveat, they're still cloud cameras) via RTSP Streaming. Using the RTSP URLs provided in the Starling app, I set my 6 Nest Cameras up as ‘Generic’ cameras in Home Assistant and was seriously blown away by the load time.

The ‘official’ Nest integration would consistently take 4-5 seconds to load the stream, and more often that not would come up with an error that too many streams are being accessed. I haven’t had this issue once since using the RTSP streams via the Starling app, and sometimes there is literally milliseconds of load time (though honestly it’s usually about 1-2 seconds). 

Plus, the Starling hub also discovered other cameras (and devices for that matter) that I had linked to my Google ecosystem that didn’t have Home Assistant plugins, such as the CuboAI baby camera we have – and it even spat out an RTSP stream for it. 🤯

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PS I know this probably sounds like an ad but I’m happy to provide proof of buying my Starling hub back in 2022 if anyone doubts me 🤣 I just wish I'd known that this feature is there earlier.