hms-nvr

A tiny C++ service that watches your Amcrest cameras and turns their event streams into clean MQTT messages. Motion, doorbell rings, and camera-down alerts land on your broker in real time — ready for Home Assistant, YOLO detection, or n8n automations. Just ~230 KB at runtime.

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C++17MQTTAmcrestDockerHome Assistant

What it does

One small daemon between your cameras and your automations.

Amcrest event streams

Long-polls each camera's HTTP event stream over libcurl with digest auth — no cloud, no polling APIs, just the events the camera already emits.

Clean MQTT events

Publishes motion start/stop, doorbell rings (PhoneCallDetect), and camera-down alerts as compact JSON payloads on predictable topics.

Multi-camera & resilient

Monitor any number of cameras with per-camera event filters. Motion dedup suppresses duplicates and connection alerting fires after repeated failures.

Get it running

Pull the image, point it at a YAML config, and you are publishing events.

Run with Docker

docker run -d \
  -v ./config/hms-nvr.yaml:/etc/hms-nvr/hms-nvr.yaml:ro \
  -p 8898:8898 \
  ghcr.io/hms-homelab/hms-nvr:latest

A health endpoint at http://localhost:8898/health reports per-camera connection state and MQTT status.

Configure a camera

cameras:
  - id: "front_door"
    name: "Front Door"
    host: "192.168.2.43"
    username: "admin"
    password: "password"
    events:
      - VideoMotion
      - PhoneCallDetect
    enabled: true

MQTT topics

camera/event/motion/start   {"camera_id":"patio"}
camera/event/motion/stop    {"camera_id":"patio"}
camera/event/doorbell       {"camera_id":"front_door"}
hms_nvr/alert/camera_down   {"camera_id":"...","failures":N}
hms_nvr/status              online / offline (retained)

Pairs with hms-detection for YOLO inference: it consumes motion/start, grabs RTSP frames, and publishes results an n8n workflow can turn into phone notifications. Set publish_motion_stop: false when using it.

Open source & MIT licensed

Grab the source, the prebuilt container, the systemd unit, and the example config — everything you need to wire Amcrest cameras into your home automation stack.

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