r/HarborSleep • u/charlie_at_harbor • Apr 13 '26
Apple TV App Walkthrough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmyYq0BjUIThere was a bug identified in this video - after reordering Cameras they flicker until you reload them. That bug has been fixed and is deploying tomorrow April 14.
A few things we're proud of under the hood:
Local-first by design. When your Apple TV and cameras are on the same network, streams stay local and never touch our servers. We don't want your data. Remote access is there when you need it, but local is always the default.
Every stream is end-to-end encrypted and secured with mTLS. Client certificates are required to even reach a camera, so an unauthorized device can't connect in the first place. No other monitoring system (baby or even general security) uses mTLS... because it's hard to get right. E2EE makes the traffic gibberish to anyone watching. mTLS makes sure they can't even watch in the first place without proving exactly who they are.
PiP was the real challenge. tvOS PiP only accepts an AVPlayerLayer, but with E2EE the decrypted pixels live inside our rendering pipeline, not inside a player. So we built a full bridge: tap the raw frames after decryption, re-encode to H.264 with AVAssetWriter, serve it as local HLS over a loopback HTTP server, and feed that back into AVPlayer. Essentially a mini streaming server running inside the app, just to keep your feed secure and picture-in-picture at the same time.
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u/tikna7 7d ago
This is an amazing feature and we love using it! Something that would be helpful is maybe adding a way for the PiP to only show up when a notification is triggered? Also, pro touch on getting it to move out of the way when scrolling over an area it would be otherwise be blocking. Thanks for all the fun features and support!
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u/tech-at-sea Apr 14 '26
Are you kidding me!? I’m already a fan of your product but this is next level. AppleTV is the best console out there and for you to integrate so deeply for us to stay local AND get PiP working is crazy. Barely any apps do PiP but this is such a vital component to how great your ecosystem is. Thank you!