Better realtime monitoring

I often find that there is a 2-5 delay after selecting a camera on my Android phone before I can see the video stream even with my high-speed internet. When someone is in the driveway or at the door, I want to be able to see the camera stream quicker.

More useful to me is to have the ability to display my camera feeds on my WIndows/Mac computer so I can watch for the UPS or FedEx driver when they arrive. Staring at my phone for hours isn’t a good workflow for me. I know there is a beta of a feature that does provide this feature, but it is laggy and often hangs or loses connection. It is not an acceptable alternative for me and wasteful of bandwidth.

So here is an idea that could solve this problem. Instead of streaming all the cameras to the cloud (which is still needed for Cam Plus, which I subscribe to), have the cameras stream to a local appliance that will then forward to the cloud. When I am at home, I point to this appliance instead of having to pull down all the data from the cloud which is just been uploaded. This should result in realtime display of the video with no startup delay.

I understand that this would be an (optional) additional expense to the customer for the hardware, but this is doable without breaking the bank. It would be a turnkey solution. Failing that, give us access to the camera stream (including the ability to download clips from the SD card) via an API as well as an API for uploading to CAM Plus and the community will create wonderful integrations that will benefit everyone.

Are you talking about the time from when you select the camera until the time until the video shows up, or once the view is up on your phone, how delayed from reality it is?

As for your idea, load RTSP firmware on the camera and the cameras can stream to whatever RTSP device or software you have. The camera will also stream to (when there is a reason) the Wyze servers.

If you’re operating on the same Wi-Fi that the cameras are you are operating on your local area network and it is actually not going through the cloud at all. The one two three steps as you connect to the camera are just verifying your app account to the cloud but the actual stream is happening from the camera to your phone through your local area network.

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The time a camera is selected and the video shows up. There doesn’t seem to be any significant lag in the video from realtime. What I really want is to be able to monitor the cameras from my PC when I am expecting a package. And to be able to download the video from the SD card directly.

I could flash the RTSP firmware, but Wyze makes it seem that I will lose access to any new features going forward. I want to support Wyze as they improve Cam Plus, but that shuts that avenue off unless I can flash the original firmware back if desired. With the current experimental RTSP firmware, does it still upload to Cam Plus? Of course, these cameras are so cheap that I could just buy another one.

Bam, that does appear to be the case at least for the mobile app. I’m not sure if that is true for the beta browser viewer. It could be, but the performance is unacceptable at this point. I had it running on Chrome and after a few hours I found out the package I was waiting for was delivered and my wife’s car was in the driveway (although the video showed it wasn’t). Restarted the page and everything back to normal.

I understand this is beta software, but the performance is going to have to improve a great deal before I could consider it a useful tool.

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I would suggest you dedicate an old phone or tablet to running the Wyze app or TinyCam full time. It makes life a lot easier - more like glancing out the window, rather than the procedure of clicking and waiting.

Re: the web client, it uses WebRTC and in most cases should be streaming locally-only just like the mobile app.

You have a very valid point there. I think I’m going to look into that and see if I can find an answer on that

Again, if you check the Kinesis docs, their WebRTC attempts P2P connections for the web client.

FYI the Fire 7 tablet is currently $35 and the HD8 is $45 (half off).

I will do a deeper dive on the forum and look at WebRTC and Kinesis. If Kinesis is a broker for local (in my case) P2P connections and gets out of the way, that might be an option. At this point, I don’t know what I don’t know. :slight_smile: Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone.

Kinesis / WebRTC is used by Wyze’s existing web client service. I was not advising that you try to use it independently. It was in regard to whether the steaming was local.

I use Bluestacks on my Win 10 Pro PC, which is an Android emulator. Works great! It’s FREE, so why not give it a try??!!