I cannot endorse WYZE cameras

I have had Nest cameras for 1 year and decided to try WYZE because they had free cloud storage and cheap cameras. I bought 3 and the hardware on WYZE is good so far but when I try to go back and look at events that happened I scroll through the video playback timeline and I cannot see any images of the people on camera as I scroll. How can I find an event that happened other than watching the whole video in real time. This is a show stopper for me. Is this just a bug I am experiencing or does the scroll playback feature not have any easy way to find events of people walking by stealing packages etc? I will unfortunately have to stick with Nest and pay the 10 dollar a month cloud storage fee.

You are conflating two different features:

  1. Cloud clips (alerts) are viewed in the Notifications tab of the app and each is 12 seconds long and shows a thumbnail of the video when the motion was captured.
  2. The video playback timeline you refer to is for local microSD card stored video only. If you set the local storage setting to Event Only, then that timeline will be shaded green where motion was captured. You can jump between motion segments using left/right arrows and expand the time scale by using a pinch-out gesture.
BTW, fast forward/reverse for the playback timeline is coming at some point.

I switched it to event only and used the arrows and it is better but it still takes a lot of time to go through all the events of bugs flying by and shadows. I will need to play with the sensitivity of motion detection not sure how good that will be. But I really look forward to the fast forward reverse. I know the company is only a year old so these things take time. When I first got Nest they could not detect a person with in a zone so I got an alert for every car that went by but over time they figured that out.

Not sure I would agree with you Chad about leaving Wyze Cams, but I do agree with you about the difficulty in viewing the SD card play back. Along with the timeline pinch it would be great to have an active scroll. If the event notification happened an hour before what you actually wanted to see, you would be sitting there a long time before getting to the actual event.

Hey Wyze Team how about an active scroll of SD card playback?

You might want to hop over and vote for the topic below. Be sure to click the VOTE button at the top:

Thanks Loki, unfortunately I am a new user (1st time on the forums) and I don’t know how to vote and don’t see what might be a vote button at the top. Do they have a special appearance that I might look for?

Never mind, I just found it accidentily.

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Until they edit the app to support this feature the best way to view µSD card recorded timeline video is to remove the µSD card from the camera and play it back with VLC video player at faster speed on your computer or Mac. Then you can simply press the space bar which pauses the video and then slow it down when you see an event you want to view in real time. This way on the highest playback speed of VLC Player the video from an entire day or night can be viewed in a very short period of time. We use this method for viewing 6 Wyze cams twice daily. It sure beats watching television.

Hope this helps,

Thanx,

73’

Tuna