I took what I have gathered from research to speculate on the encoding profiles that are used in the Wyze firmware.
This reveals some interesting details. I have further speculated on the bitrate on the audio encoding in order to subtract audio and reveal the underlying video bitrate.
I have then taken the Samsung PRO Endurance microSD card in order to derive the life expectancy of the microSD card in a Wyze camera. This gives some clues into the controller on the SD card as TLC is generally rated for 1000 writes, so there is likely multiple layers (3D) of TLC with a controller doing wear leveling.
I speculate that the h.264 bitrate are as follows:
- SD and HD profile is between 0.9-1.45Mbps during daytime (15 FPS) and 0.5Mbps for nighttime (10FPS).
- 360p profile is between 0.24-0.39Mbps during the daytime (15FPS) and 0.1Mbps for nighttime (10FPS).
This assumes 32Kbps or lower audio encoding (hence the really bad audio quality).
It is easy to see that if the Wyze devices support a good audio codec (e.g. AAC) that there is an opportunity to increase the bitrate for audio. Mono CD-quality audio can be had for 64Kbps using AAC with minimal impact on the storage requirements. This would go a long way to improve the quality of the overall product in my opinion. However, it is possible that the hardware does not have modern codecs implemented and/or the tuning by Wyze is what resulted in a necessary compromise in audio quality.
I did this analysis not owning a Wyze device. I just took the published specs as well as some of the reviews I have read. What do you think?
Edit: I have since purchased a Wyze v2 and 128GB Samsung PRO Endurance microSD card.