WebRTC

WebRTC provides better, more responsive camera streaming in Home Assistant while you are away from home. As part of your Home Assistant Cloud subscription, you get access to a relay server that allows you to use this technology more often, which gives you the opportunity to watch your cameras with the lowest latency possible, no matter where you are.

How it works

WebRTC is a standard that makes a peer-to-peer connection for lower-latency audio and video streaming. It is widely used across the internet for video calling. Home Assistant uses WebRTC to provide more responsive and less delayed camera streaming. When you’re away from home, WebRTC will try to find the fastest and most direct path between your Home Assistant instance and the camera you are trying to view.

While all Home Assistant users can use WebRTC connections thanks to the Open Home Foundation hosting the negotiating network infrastructure (STUN servers), sometimes a direct connection between the client (like your browser or mobile app) and the camera is not possible; in these situations, the camera stream needs to be relayed by an external server. Your Home Assistant Cloud subscription provides this relay server (TURN server), allowing you to connect to your cameras in the best possible way in more situations. To learn how this works in greater detail, you can read up on how NAT traversal works.

Turning off the relay server

WebRTC connections via our relay server (TURN server) are enabled by default. If, for some reason, you would like to turn this feature off and only use peer-to-peer connections without the relay functionality, this setting is available.

1. In Home Assistant, go to Settings > Home Assistant Cloud.
2. Under WebRTC connections, disable the toggle.