Forcing cam plus on us AGAIN

I can assure you that they didn’t close any loophole, and it wasn’t a loophole in the first place. At worst, it’s intentional bad UI design, at best it’s unintentional bad UI design. “Bate” and switch sounds like something you don’t want to share with Wyze to improve AI.

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Exactly. Well put. This is just how I feel about the situation. Regardless of their model and business plans, there is just no excuse for not clearly explaining and making it easy for customers to find and understand the various options and how to select them. Major fail.

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I agree with your comments. I have been with Wyze since they started out. Wyze used to offer good cameras at a really cheap price but that is no longer the case. I have 3 Wyze Cam Pan v2’s and 1 Wyze Cam v2. Wyze cloud service was great until they changed their business model to fee based. I did switch over to the Cam Lite service with the $0 option. I understand they need to generate revenue stream to stay profitable but the way they went about it looks deceptive and out of desperation. Companies today are all offering subscription services as a revenue stream but it won’t work because these fees add up over time and become cost prohibitive when you add them together. Customers will eventually drop the subscription service from one company to pay for the other service.

I started switching my Wyze cameras to RTSP so I can save my recordings to my NAS. I will no longer purchase Wyze products out of fear that they will charge fees for all their product services. If my Wyze cameras fail, I will eventually switch over to Eufy cameras as long as they don’t jump on the subscription band wagon.

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While I appreciate the community and getting this working. If they offered an option to pull those 12 second clips off of the SD card instead I would be ok with that instead of using the cloud resources. Something maybe they can incorporate in a future update. Would save them money for us freeloaders :slight_smile:

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Very good suggestion. (Providing the ability to save the short motion camera events to the SD card.). I disagree all businesses need to grow and get huge. Why not carve out a niche serving people who want an inexpensive simple solutions using well designed products. I love being able to look out my front door and what might be moving around it and at my thermostat when on vacation. Thats it.

But that’s what you can do right now simply by declining Lite. The resulting thumbnails will point to motion events on your SD card. And they’re longer than 12 seconds.

But you can already save short and long motion camera events to the SD card…

While it’s true the thumbails point to longer recordings on the SD card that is much less convenient than clicking a thumbnail and seeing a 12 second clip to better determine if you need to go to the card and scroll to the spot on the card.

So you’d want them to record the same thing to SD twice, once for just the first 12 seconds and once again in full? I’m not sure I see the point. If you have SD card set to record on motion, it should work well enough as is?

The point is convenience. I check my events a couple times a day. Very convenient to just click on the thumbnail and have the 12 second clip play. On rare occassions i see something in the clipthat prompts me to look for the longer recording on the SD card. That step is much less convenient.
The current situation (using Lite to access the 12 second clips in the cloud) is great. The concern is all cloud based services will eventually have a cost. In that scenario would be nice to have the easy review feature become SD card based.
What was not great is the hassle invovled to find the Lite version of the software. Very confusing process.

I have spent many hours trying to get recording to SDcard. I’ve had email since 1979 and bring decades of experience with malfunctioning software. I have 3 V2 cameras and 1 V3. I am willing to contribute for the service, but wanted to see if it would work as expected first. Prior to the upgrade, you could view 12 seconds in EVENTS and if you chose VIEW PLAYBACK, you could view a longer segment, What I expected to happen with the upgrade is that I would get a still image and then be able to View Playback video of the event. That would solve Wyze’s problem with overloading cloud storage. I did not bite on the Lite option because it sounded like it relied on the AI screening of detected motion such that I would only get notice of persons, pets, etc. I want all the Motion notifications. I am currently using this work-around: Since without a subscription one can turn on motion recording, but only for STILL images which come via the cloud. No video is recorded to the SD Card even though the settings are set to record to SD card. What I have to do is set Continuous recording to the SD Card. Then if I View Playback from the IMAGE notification, it does bring me to the the time period of the motion induced image on the continuous recording . There remain intermittant problems convincing some cameras even to record continuously and I have not yet gotten all four to work at the same time. Lots or reformatting and restarting cameras when I am at the camera’s location. Because I am so often trouble-shooting and reformatting, I don’t have experience with what happens when SD card space is consumed so I reformat periodically.

The recording should loop back and overwrite the oldest recordings. You shouldn’t need to format the SD card.

That should not be necessary. It should work as it always has when motion recording to SD is enabled.

I have been searching threads for some answers and some have gotten so long they are impossible to read. Anther problem is many posters do not specify which Wyze cam they are referring to, so I’m not sure what should work on mine. So I’ll ask some questions here since Cam Plus and CPL are part of my questions.
First I have Wyze Cam Outdoor, SD cards in the cams and the base, I have NOT signed up for CPL or CP. I know that the thumbnails I am viewing on the Events tab are from the Cloud, not the SD card.
Question 1. What is suppose to be recording to the SD cards that are in my cameras, thumbnails or 12sec videos? Question 2. Is there suppose to be a playback option in the App for the SD card that is in a camera? Question 3. What is suppose to be recording to the SD card that is in my base, thumbnails or 12sec videos?. Question 4. If I sign up for CPL or CP I read in another thread that I would no longer have anything record to the SD card in the Base. Is that true??

The fact is 12 second of cloud could become a cost factor for any company over time. The bad part is that they kept that at cloud and not had a solution to store on SD card. Saw some posts of people moving to EUFY and so am I. The fact that you have to have a subscription of something that does not cost anything for now is silly. Their intent with CAM PLUS LITE is two fold.

You absolutely, positively DO NOT need any sort of CamPlus/CamPlusLite subscription in order to record or view uSD card recordings.
Note that I am not speaking about the Outdoor camera because it is highly crippled in order to extend battery life.

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Not now really if you purchase the solar panels… i have had some really good results installing them in 3 of my outdoor cameras… what was charging them once every 2 weeks, is now charging them mostly every 4 weeks (lots of events sometimes brings that down to charging them every 3 weeks - still pretty good).
DeVoiD

My V2 (Camplus)starts with

OFFline
then after Update firmware 1002, got dead V2.
took 100 tries to get V2 re-add to account.
then fail events page eithin 24hrs.
after submitted log and posted request Fix it Friday. V2 back working again. for 48 hrs.
V2 no detection, no thumbnail events and No notification. OffLine screen

but

Wyze is firing Pop up to. subscribe Csmplus.

Wyze is purging Camplus Light users., typical Bait and switch.

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My experience was that I could not get recording to SDCard on V2 & V3 cameras until I enrolled in Lite… (After hours of applying my software testing experience.) Even though I have not enrolled any of my cameras in the lite program and keep getting prompted to do so, I have succeed in continuously recording to SDcard, getting images notifying motion,and accessing the time of the alert on the continuous recording using PLAYBACK. This works perfectly for me and I looked on the website for a way to contribute for my unpaid service without success. Perhaps in a year I’ll be invited to renew and can pay up.