Matter cameras are getting a proper home in Home Assistant. On 22 October 2026 the Matter integration gained a camera platform, merged into the development branch that becomes Home Assistant 2026.11. A Matter 1.5 camera now shows up as an ordinary camera entity, with live video and still images in the same views and cards you already use for other cameras. The pull request by Artur Pragacz had been open since 9 July.

What it needs

The integration does not talk to the camera on its own. It relies on the camera API that arrived in Matter Server 1.5.0 on 20 October, which manages the streams and WebRTC sessions for the client. Home Assistant only discovers cameras when the connected server reports WebSocket schema 14 or newer, which is the version that API introduced.

That is the catch for now. The stable Matter Server app, version 9.2.0, still bundles server 1.4.0, so on a standard installation cameras will not appear until the app moves to the 1.5 line. Anyone testing the newer server early should know that 1.5.1, released on 21 October, fixed the migration from the old Python Matter Server so that migrated devices stay available.

How the video gets to you

The camera entity uses Home Assistant's native WebRTC support. When you open a stream, the frontend's offer goes through the Matter server, which sets up or reuses the camera's streams and passes the offer on. The camera's answer comes back the same way. After that, the video travels directly between the browser and the camera rather than through Home Assistant.

Home Assistant also passes its configured ICE servers to the camera, including the Nabu Casa TURN server when one is available. That matters when the browser and the camera cannot reach each other directly.

A few other details from the change:

  • Still images come from the server as JPEG snapshots, at the size the frontend asks for.
  • The entity reports the camera as on or off based on its privacy mode settings.
  • The streaming state follows the camera's active sessions.
  • If the camera ends a session on its own, the frontend gets an error instead of a silently frozen picture.

What it does not do yet

This is the first step of an item on the Open Home Foundation roadmap, "Support Matter cameras using the existing camera UI". The goal there is to cover the essentials and build on them later. Full pan, tilt and zoom control, two-way audio, recording and features such as AI detection are explicitly out of scope for this round, and two-way audio has its own roadmap item.

The roadmap also names the main risk. Few reference cameras are available, and testing so far has been done mainly with the Aqara G350. If you own a different Matter camera, expect some rough edges when 2026.11 arrives.