I’m finding that my Wyze cams miss a lot of motion because the clips seem to be capped at a maximum of 12 seconds worth of video. That’s a big issue for a situation like a burglary, where your alerts only catch the first 12 seconds of the incident because the burglar also stole your camera! There needs to be a way to set the maximum length for each alert video, so that motion doesn’t get missed.
Also, someone else had mentioned a minimum length setting, for the motion detection alerts, to prevent false positives. The sensitivity adjustment bars just are not precise enough for this.
The alert clips in the cloud are limited to 12 seconds with a timeout after each alert of 5 minutes. This provides a reasonable tradeoff for Wyze to be able to provide the cloud storage for free.
For longer motion recording, you can install a microSD card in the camera which will record either continuously or constantly as long as motion continues to be detected.
I can totes understand that you don’t want to store more than 12 seconds of video on your S3 for free. But maybe add a setting where we can put in our own bucket name and key and secret to upload to our own S3 bucket. OR sftp credentials to upload video in 12 second files? ANYTHING to get that video off of the camera and onto a host on a network the burglar can’t steal.
I just saw that openipcam has support for rtsp streaming, and inbound sftp connetions (so something remote could connect in to pull video off the sd card each minute).
Perhaps Wyze could borrow the implementation from openipcamera?
I’ve got 5 wyzes coming in the mail tomorrow, and I’m going to have an openipcamera installer SD card ready for them. I’m going to try it out on at least one. Your android app and free cloud offer is nice and all. But I wants to hook these up to a zoneminder server.
I hope it’s ok to mention https://openip.cam here. I hope that project is actually a positive for you, as once a camera’s flashed to it, you can write off the cost of supporting that unit, and its cloud usage.
Thanks RickO for answering this one! I would like to add that we are working on reducing false positives whenever possible. We consider motion detection to be one of the primary features, and as such want to keep improving it!
I do believe we are looking into adding support for redirecting where your videos go, which would enable longer clips defined by the user. I do not currently have more information on this besides that it is being considered, but if implemented I wouldn’t expect it for a little while. I do make sure the Devs hear about the frequency of requests however, just so everyone is aware that your requests are heard by us!
@BillyCrook, mentioning it is fine! We do not discourage creative ways of using our product! I would only like to add that should the camera require any troubleshooting while running this, we would need to flash it back to our software before we are able to assist, but that is only because our techs will not be familiar with their firmware.
There is one thing bothering me more than the 12s/5min limitation which is “No video at the selected time”. I use “Record events only” recording. When I try to select events moving that RED line to overlap the GREEN lines, many times I got this “No video at the selected time” even though visually the RED and GREEN lines do overlap.
Can Wyze developers add a snap on function, i.e.
If I am moving the RED line to the right, when I stop the program will snap to the closest event to the right of the RED light in case the RED line is not overlapping with any event.
vice versa for moving the RED line to the left.
This way it will prevent "No video at the selected time" from happening again.
The Samsung smartcam has similar snap on function when viewing events recorded.
Just to clarify… the 12s/5min limitation has nothing to do with the mSD card recordings accessed via View Playback.
When viewing mSD card playback, are you aware that you can expand the timeline using a pinch out gesture which gives you much finer control of where the playback line rests?
I like the idea of (optional) snap to video event though.