Rate of consumption of Micro SD storage space

Is the storage space consumed on the Micro SD proportional to the amount of activity seen by the camera? If my camera is expected to see only about 20 minutes of activity per day, what is an estimation of the rate at which storage would be consumed at 360p?

Sounds like you are going to use Events Only recording?

Whether Events only or Continuous, the below should guide you. There are 72 twenty-minute segments in a day, so if they say they can record a day, then that is 72 days if you only record 20 minutes a day.

They don’t specify 360p, but for HD, the video size is approximately 400MB/hour (~10GB/day). For SD, the video size is approximately 130MB/hour (3-4GB/day).

So you get 7-8 days of recording on a 32 GB card when recording SD. You get 2-3 days when recording HD. That’s continuous. To convert to your 20 minutes a day multiply by 72.

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Thanks. I want to use continuous recording. What format does wyze use to store the recorded videos? If they use a compressed format like mp4 then the storage space used should be proportional to the activity seen by the camera even if set to continuous. So with 20 minutes activity a day 72x7 days on 32GB is impressive. If I use a 128GB SD card then I should get 72x7x4 = ~5.5 years. That is either very impressive or I am missing something.

Yes, it’s .mp4 and obviously YMMV due to the compression and what the camera sees. So, just averages for the most part.

Your calcs look good to me. Remember you are only recording 20 minutes a day.

So, why would you want to keep 20 minutes a day for 5-1/2 years? And how are you going to capture it? Turn the camera on for 20 minutes a day?

I plan to keep the camera on all the time. Note that I said that the expected activity the camera will see is only about 20 minutes a day. For the rest of the day what the camera sees will not change. Is my estimation still correct?

No, you should go with the quotes they give. The image the camera records will not be a photograph that never changes. It will constantly churn and be new. Only if you actually record 20 minutes a day would you use your assumption.

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Where can I find “the quotes they give”?

I pasted them into response #2 above. The whole write-up is here:

https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022500271&?section=supported-cards&?subsection=undefined

I believe @Newshound was extrapolating your 20 minutes/day estimate to show how many days it would take before you started overwriting old videos.

If you’re talking about continuous recording then even a completely static picture will consume about 10GB/day. MP4 is an efficient codec, but it still has to encode I-frames at regular intervals whether the picture changed or not. While the quality of the picture improves the less motion there is, the bitrate remains relatively constant.

For reference, I use 64GB and 128GB cards in my cams and I get about 6 and 13 days respectively of continuous recording.

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If you are going to record continuously, it will use up space even if the camera sees very little activity. I am looking at one of my cameras at a remote communications site. The site is normally unattended and the camera I am looking at gets a little daylight through a vent, so the room gets light and dark each day. Other than that, there is not much activity. As I type this at 0725 on 18 June, the earliest recording is 0300 on 2 June. This is with a 64GB uSD card.
By comparison a camera that is looking out my front window so it sees every car and person going by, the shadow of my flags, and several trees. The earliest recording on that camera is 1100 on 14 June. That camera also has a 64 GB uSD card.

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Thanks. So about about 16 days to consume 64GB with very little activity. That is helpful empirical data. Is it HD or SD?

That was SD, but it does not make much difference if the image changes very little.