Log tells bridged camera support is discontinued, does this effect Ring Door Bell cameras?

[woccam]

The log tells: "Bridged camera support will be removed in the next major release of homebridge-ring. Please enable the unbridgeCameras option in your configuration and add the individual cameras to HomeKit to prepare for this change." Does this affect Ring Door cameras? Does this mean they will no longer be supported at all or how do I integrate them directly?

[tsightler]

A Ring doorbell is a camera, so yes, they are impacted. The unbridgeCameras option is not new, it's just that, in a future version, that will be the only option, so we are suggesting users go through the steps now. It just means that, instead of adding the bridge once, and all the cameras show up, the cameras must be added as an individual accessories to Homekit. The process of adding an individual camera is not really different than adding a bridge and is already discussed here in multiple threads.

Note that this is not something unique, if you purchased individual Homekit compatible cameras, you'd have to add those as individual cameras as well. With this setting, each camera is treated as an individual camera which, underneath, has many benefits which impact maintainability and, in certain cases, usability, especially cases where a user has a large number of cameras. Yes, it's somewhat of a pain to go through and add 8 individual cameras, but, overall, the cameras will likely work far better after this.

[dscheck]

@tsightler I changed my setting to "unbridgeCameras": true and I was able to add back my various Ring flood lights and a Ring doorbell that is shared to me from my son's Ring doorbell at his school, but my front door Ring doorbell keeps taking a long time and then eventually says "Unable to Add Accessory, Accessory is not reachable". Any ideas what I can do?

[dscheck]

It seems that completely shutting down my phone and restarting and then trying again in the home app to add the Ring doorbell now immediately worked. I tried it like 20 times force quitting the Home app and restarting home bridge and nothing worked but restarting the phone did it.

[gdavids57]

Just to add to the instructions... While adding the camera accessory in the Home app, the app will prompt for a Setup Code. Use the Homebridge setup QR code on the Status page. After completing the setup and seeing the camera in the Home app, I'm still seeing a message in the Homebridge log calling for a manual setup of the camera. Is this normal.

[tsightler]

I wouldn't say the message is calling for anything to be done, the message is simply providing the information on how to add cameras (the message is unchanged for years). The plugin doesn't have any way to know if you've already added the devices already or not. Is there some other wording for that informational message that would make that more clear?

[gdavids57]

I think a clause like, "if you've made the changes, ignore the following..." would be helpful.

[tsightler]

I don't think that really statement really fits though as it's not always changes that need to be made, it could be initial setup for example and it needs to be on the same line as sometimes log messages are not in strict order. Maybe it could just be reworded to sounds less like a request? Homebridge logs the steps for adding itself to Homekit on every boot, regardless of whether it was already added or not, and somehow that doesn't seem to confuse people so it's not really clear to me why these log lines are unclear. I think about possible tweaks to the phrasing.