We are thrilled to announce free end-to-end encrypted WebRTC camera and video streaming for Home Assistant for our remote access service! And it’s not just free STUN server support, but free TURN relay servers as well! (If you don’t know what that is, keep reading)
What’s Homeway? A Home Assistant community project that enables:
- 🚀 Free and secure Home Assistant remote access.
- 📺 Free and secure WebRTC camera and video streaming.
- 🤖 No-hassle Alexa and Google Home integrations.
- 🌿 Sage AI – A life-like Home Assistant Assist AI
- 🔥 Webhooks, apps, local access, shared access, and more!
What is WebRTC, and why is it so awesome with Home Assistant? Glad you asked! WebRTC is a real-time video streaming protocol developed by Google. It enables low-latency, end-to-end encrypted audio and video streaming over the public internet. With Home Assistant, WebRTC enables live streaming of your camera, videos, dashboards, and media with ultra-low latency.
How do I set up WebRTC streaming in Home Assistant? It’s extremely easy, just install the Homeway Add-on for Home Assistant; it only takes about 20 seconds. Don’t believe us? Try it!
Free STUN Servers For Home Assistant
Homeway is proud to offer the entire Home Assistant community 100% free and unlimited use of our STUN WebRTC servers for Home Assistant video and camera streaming. Remember that your WebRTC streams are end-to-end encrypted, so Homeway cannot access your data. (and we wouldn’t want to anyway)
Our free Home Assistant WebRTC STUN servers are:
The easiest way to configure STUN servers in Home Assistant is to install the Homeway add-on, which will do the configuration automatically!
Free TURN Servers For Home Assistant
Unique to Homeway, we are proud to offer the entire Home Assistant community free access to our TURN WebRTC servers for Home Assistant video and camera streaming!
TURN servers relay end-to-end-encrypted traffic, so they cost more to operate. We allow all Home Assistant users free but limited usage. Homeway project Supporters can unlock much higher usage limits by supporting Homeway for only $3.49/month.
Our free Home Assistant WebRTC TURN servers are:
turn:webrtc.homeway.io:3478?transport=udpturn:webrtc.homeway.io:53?transport=udpturn:webrtc.homeway.io:3478?transport=tcpturns:webrtc.homeway.io:443?transport=tcp
The easiest way to configure TURN servers in Home Assistant is to install the Homeway add-on, which will do the configuration automatically!
We offer free, anonymous use of our TURN servers, but we allow much higher free usage for Homeway add-on users. This helps keep our costs down, since anonymous TURN servers can be used by anyone on the internet for anything.
WebRTC Is Awesome
If you want to learn more about how WebRTC can stream Home Assistant-end-to-end-encrypted audio and video, you need to understand the protocols it uses. Don’t worry, we will keep it high-level.
Two Ways To Connect
WebRTC has two connection modes: the first is a direct streaming connection between your device and your Home Assistant server. The second is a fallback streaming relay connection. WebRTC uses the ICE protocol to establish these connections. ICE consists of sub-protocols called STUN and TURN.
Direct Connections
Direct connections are the most ideal way to stream audio and video with low latency. Since the data is encrypted by your Home Assistant server and decrypted only on your local device for playback, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
To make a direct connection, WebRTC has to do fancy tricks to get around certain network conditions, like NATs. This is where WebRTC uses STUN servers. STUN is a very simple protocol that allows your Home Assistant server and device to discover their public internet IPs, which they need to connect directly. STUN also helps with NAT traversal, meaning it tells your NAT to expect packets from the public internet and route them to your Home Assistant server or device.
WebRTC always tries to establish a direct connection using STUN first. Most of the time, this succeeds, and you will have the lowest latency and highest bandwidth possible for streaming.
TURN Relay – For When It Doesn’t Work
In some network setups (or network topologies is the fancy way of saying it), a direct connection can’t be made. This can be due to a number of factors, including double NAT, corporate firewalls, and other issues.
When you can’t connect directly via STUN, you need a TURN relay server! TURN is another WebRTC ICE protocol that allows your Home Assistant server and client to relay packets to a public internet server. Using a public internet server solves the double-NAT issue, since both your Home Assistant server and remote device can always connect to public internet servers. TURN traffic can be streamed over common internet protocol ports, such as HTTPS (port 443), so most corporate firewalls allow it.
TURN basically acts as a small private tunnel to get your Home Assistant camera or video stream out onto the public internet, where your remote device can access it. It’s important to note that your WebRTC video and audio streams are still encrypted on your Home Assistant servers and can only be decrypted using the keys private to your remote device. This means the connection is still end-to-end encrypted, and the TURN server can’t see the contents.
Are you ready to set up our free WebRTC integration for Home Assistant?
WebRTC In Home Assistant
What can you do with WebRTC in Home Assistant? As of Home Assistant version 2026.1, Home Assistant has built-in WebRTC support! This means that most of the Home Assistant video streaming will use WebRTC by default. But it doesn’t mean you get STUN and TURN servers by default; you either need to manually configure them or use an add-on like Homeway.
With WebRTC in Home Assistant, your remote access to video and audio streams is end-to-end encrypted, low-latency, and high-quality.
If you need more configuration and power, the WebRTC Camera integration in the HACS is what you need. WebRTC Camera is one of the most downloaded integrations in the Home Assistant Community Store. WebRTC Camera enables WebRTC streaming for many more Home Assistant devices and entity types, including cameras, images, AI, and more.
Installing WebRTC Camera From HACS
To install WebRTC Camera, you first need to install the HACS integration for Home Assistant. You can find a HACS install guide here.
Install WebRTC Camera:
- Open the HACS UI
- Search for
WebRTC Camera - Open the WebRTC Camera page and click Download at the bottom right.
- Once it’s done installing, restart Home Assistant.
- Open the device and integrations settings in Home Assistant.
- Search for the WebRTC integration.
- For the go2rtc URL, leave the field blank to use the built-in server.
- Done!
With WebRTC Camera, you can use almost any kind of video stream from a Home Assistant entity or device, and it will stream via WebRTC! Supported protocols include anything supported by go2rtc, including rtsp, rtmp, http, onvif, dvrip, homekit, roborock, and more. WebRTC Camera for Home Assistant even supports two-way audio for RTSP cameras, DVRIP, TP Link Tapo, Roborock vacuums, doorbird, exec, Ring cameras, Tuya, Wayze cameras, and more!
You can also consider using the Advanced Camera Card integration in HACS, which works very well WebRTC Camera for WebRTC streaming directly in Home Assistant dashboard cards.
Join The Homeway Community
WebRTC for Home Assistant is awesome, and so is our Homeway community! Homeway is developed by and for the Home Assistant community. We have built an amazingly friendly, helpful, and chill community of Home Assistant users, and we would love for you to join!
