Newbie question - IP Cams to Google Assistant device, viable?

Devices & Integrations
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Total newbie here, first post and hoping this is the right place to post this. Currently I am researching to see if the Smartthings hub is going to be suitable for my needs.

I have several Foscam IP cameras, I see there are some device integrations available from the community that support these cameras, so my guess is that integrating these may not be too hard. What I want to do is get the cameras working with my Google Assistant display devices, I can see there is Smartthings integration with Google Assistant. Ideally, I want to issue a voice command to Google to ‘Display Camera 1’ and have that camera show up on the Google Assistant display device. From the research I have done so far I suspect I may need to deploy the ‘cast-web’ integration to do this.

So my question is this - is this use case remotely viable? Or have I misunderstood how the Smartthings Hub can be made to work?

I should add that this need arises as the cameras I have are not be supported models using Foscam’s own app for Google Home integration.

Any pointers/hints/suggestions on the viability of this would be much appreciated.

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Your Foscam cameras are going to work only with the Google Assitant as you want if they are listed here and the feature turned on.

https://www.foscam.com/faqs/view.html?id=253

Other option is might be TinyCam or BlueIris running on an old Android phone. But I haven’t got any experience with that.

@joshua_lyon might can help. They use one of those softwares to add camera displays to Sharptools.io.

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Displaying a camera stream in Google Assistant Display devices is handled completely outside of SmartThings.

The SmartThings-Google Assistant integration is centered around smart devices - controlling lights, reporting sensor status, etc.

Edit: You might be able to use cast-web-api or ‘Assistant Relay’ (with CATT) to trigger an action that casts a stream to a display. IIRC, the stream formats that are supported by cast devices are fairly limited though. Be sure to report back if you get something working!

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@joshua_lyon, which software do you use to convert the stream format? That might helps the OP.

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I don’t recall which formats Google supports. I just recall following a couple camera manufacturers, like Wyze, who had to add transcoding to the get streams into a format supported by Google.

On the SharpTools.io side of things, browsers don’t support RTSP streams natively, so TinyCam and Blue Iris are popular for translating the camera streams into a format that a browser supports (eg. MJPEG).

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Hi Gabor and Josh, many thanks for your input and assistance on this.

Looks like my understanding of how the Smartthings box works was not totally correct, clearly it’s more about a central point to control the logical interactions of smart devices and not so much about casting content, which kind of makes sense.

However I did manage to put together a solution using a combination of IFTTT, Tasker and AutoCast on an old Android device I had lying around. It’s a little clunky but fine for my purposes.

Thanks again for your assistance.