Widget

Camera

A live camera tile. Streams any Home Assistant camera (HLS, WebRTC, MJPEG or polled snapshots) or an Apple Home camera through HomeKit, with a tap-to-expand full-screen viewer, optional pan/tilt/zoom, clip recording, and motion or doorbell alerts that pop up on your dashboard.

What it does

The camera widget fills its tile with a live feed. Tap the tile to open a full-screen viewer; tap the feed again to shrink it back down. Flux picks the best stream method automatically, and every state — loading spinner, live image, or error — fills the same frame so the tile never jumps size when the feed connects.

Home Assistant and Apple Home A normal HA camera streams over URLs (HLS / WebRTC / MJPEG / snapshot). An Apple Home camera (entity id contains ahk_) streams through HomeKit's own APIs instead — tiles poll snapshots and full screen starts the live HomeKit stream. Apple Home cameras have no recording or PTZ APIs, so those controls don't appear for them.

Add it

Enter edit mode, tap Add Widget, choose Camera.
Pick the camera entity.
Open the widget's inspector (tap the widget while editing) to set the stream method, fit, motion/doorbell alerts, PTZ, and recording.

Live feed & snapshots

The Stream setting controls how the feed is delivered:

Auto — prefers HLS when the camera reports an hls or web_rtc frontend stream type (this covers WebRTC cameras like UniFi Protect, which still serve HLS through Home Assistant's stream API), otherwise falls back to MJPEG.
HLS — smooth playback through an AVPlayer.
WebRTC — low-latency; served as HLS via Home Assistant's camera stream API.
MJPEG — a continuous multipart frame stream.
Snapshot — a still image re-fetched about every 1.5 seconds; the last frame is held until the next one arrives so it never flickers.

Self-healing feeds Long-lived tiles watch their own playback. An HLS stream that stalls (segment expiry, a network blip, backgrounding) is rebuilt automatically; an MJPEG stream that delivers no frame for 8 seconds reconnects. A tile that started before the connection was up keeps retrying instead of freezing on a blank frame.

Full-screen viewer

Tapping a tile opens the camera full screen on a black background. The viewer shows a Record button (HA cameras only), a close button, and — when enabled — on-screen PTZ controls. Tapping the feed itself closes the viewer. The same viewer is what opens when you tap a motion pop-up.

Motion & doorbell alerts

A camera can watch a trigger entity and surface an in-app pop-up and/or a local notification when it fires. Flux polls the configured cameras once a second from the main screen.

Trigger type — Motion or Doorbell. This changes the wording ("Motion detected" vs. "Doorbell ringing"), the icon, and which sensor Flux auto-wires.
Auto-wired sensor — if you don't pick a trigger entity, Flux finds one on the camera's own device: a binary_sensor with a matching device class (motion/occupancy for motion; doorbell/sound/occupancy for doorbell). You can override it by picking any entity yourself.
Trigger edge — a binary_sensor fires on its off→on transition. An event.* entity (e.g. a doorbell-press event) fires when its state timestamp changes.
Pop-up scope — where the pop-up may appear: Off, Only on this dashboard (just when that dashboard is the one on screen), or Any screen.
Notify on trigger — also sends a local notification (with sound) even when the app isn't focused on a relevant screen. Notification permission is requested the first time it's needed.

The pop-up shows the camera name, a live preview of the feed, and an Open button; tapping the preview or Open expands it to the full-screen viewer. Only one pop-up shows at a time.

Pan / tilt / zoom

Enable Pan / tilt / zoom controls to overlay a directional pad and zoom buttons in the full-screen viewer. Each press calls your camera's PTZ service (default onvif.ptz) with ONVIF-style directions — pan LEFT/RIGHT, tilt UP/DOWN, zoom ZOOM_IN/ZOOM_OUT — targeted at the camera entity.

Recordings

The Record button in the full-screen viewer (and the "Record a clip" tap action) calls Home Assistant's camera.record service. The clip records for the set duration, stops automatically, and saves into your Home Assistant's /media/recordings.

Duration — clip length in seconds (5–600).
Lookback — seconds of pre-roll captured before you pressed record (requires a camera that supports it).
File path — where the clip is written; templated, default /media/recordings/{{ entity_id }}.mp4. Use a timestamped path so repeating clips don't overwrite each other.

Play saved clips with the View recordings tap action, or from Settings › Media.

Settings

Option	What it does
Stream	Delivery method: Auto (best available), HLS (smooth), WebRTC (low latency), MJPEG, or Snapshot (still).
Fit	Fill crops the feed to fill the tile; Fit shows the whole frame letterboxed.
Trigger	Motion or Doorbell — sets the alert wording/icon and which sensor is auto-wired.
Motion sensor / Doorbell entity	The trigger entity. Leave unset to auto-detect a matching `binary_sensor` on the camera's device.
Notify on trigger	Send a local notification (with sound) when the camera triggers.
Pop-up	In-app alert scope: Off, Only on this dashboard, or Any screen.
Pan / tilt / zoom controls	Show PTZ controls in full screen.
PTZ service	The `domain.service` called for PTZ moves (default `onvif.ptz`). Shown only when PTZ is enabled.
Record duration	Clip length in seconds (5–600) for `camera.record`.
Recording file path	Templated destination for clips (default `/media/recordings/{{ entity_id }}.mp4`).

A camera under other widgets stays tappable The video layer is purely visual and never grabs touches, so widgets stacked on top of a camera still respond to taps. Camera taps are handled by the widget's own gesture.