This looks the most promising. I’ll take a closer look. Does it provide a rtsp stream?

Any PC that has virtualization features can be used. Unless it’s very old, I’d say it’s supported. But it may not be enabled in the bios by default. It’s called VT-x for Intel and AMD-v for AMD, I think. But both are supported for at least 10 years on almost any PC.

It’s a hypervisor level virtual machine host and you can use it to install multiple os’s on the same machine with little overhead. I’ve been running haos like that for a few months now and I’m super satisfied.

Yes, for one device, I’d do wifi too. ZigBee does add complexity, but it also adds many possibilities. Esphome is a good solution, I use it also. In fact it seemlessly integrates with HA, so it doesn’t matter

One of the bigger reasons is ZigBee is capable of mesh network forming, which is useful if you want more devices to be smart. It’s also low power. And the devices are in their private network isolated from the internet, which is also a desirable quality. In summary, ZigBee is built for smart devices, whereas wifi not so much.

I have a newer ZigBee 3.0 dongle and run a few add-ons, but nothing big - z2m, nodered, mosquito is all I use. I will upgrade anyway, but I’m not in a hurry, it works fine, apart from an occasional delay in switching, which might be network related.

When you switched from pi3 to NUC , did you notice any performance improvements? I’m asking because I run my setup on a rpi3 and it mostly works ok, but the latency is sometimes high, so I’m wondering if upgrading the host will improve things.