Hello, I have two of the Wyze cams and love them. I havre two basic questions. One involves the recording to the SD card. I have a card in each cam, but only see jpegs from alerts, no video. I reformatted a card to start from scratch, called up a camera and hit the record button on the app. Then I remove the card and could not find the video. IS the video recording to Wyze servers and not the card? How does one record to the card, the card and server (14 days life there I think) or just the server? In other words, I’m not fully understanding when the SD card comes in.
The s second question is, if Wyze is using AWS as it’s hosting platform, regardless of all the back and forth about Chinese servers, is there an opinion about where these wonderful little cameras are not as secure as one that is Homekit compatible, in terms of decreasing the odds that someone else is able to view your camera? I know nothing is 100% secure if it’s connected to the internet, but some articles speak to higher-priced or home kit-configured cameras as having better security. I have friends that also love there Wyze cams but will not point them anywhere they would expect privacy. Thanks all.
The SD card allows the camera to record continuously or only when motion is detected and store those recordings on the SD card for playback later. You can enable SD recording by tapping the gear icon at the top right from the camera live view, tap “Advanced Settings”, tap “Local Storage” then toggle the “Local recording to micro SD card” setting.
Once enabled you will see two options: “Record events only” and “Continuous recording”. Continuous recording will record continuously, overwriting the oldest files as new video is recorded. On a 32GB card this equates to about 3 days of recording. Event only recording will record only while motion is being detected, so it allows you to store recordings longer and makes it easier to pick out motion events from the playback timeline.
SD recording is separate from and can operate concurrently with the 12-second video clips that are uploaded to the Wyze cloud when motion/sound is detected. Those clips are limited to 12 seconds and there is a 5-minute “cooldown” period between clips, so if for example a passing car triggered an alert and then 1 minute later you walk past the camera, you would get an alert for the car but not for the person walking by because it’s within the 5-minute cooldown period.
Homekit would have better security on the device as long as the device contains Apple’s security chip. This chip is designed to help prevent direct hacking of the device via firmware or other software updates. This chip would not inherently increase security of any data stored on external devices whether a cloud server or SD card…
This is a good general rule for any camera. No matter how secure it is, there’s always the possibility that the video may be seen by unauthorized parties. I wouldn’t point a HomeKit or Nest camera in any of those areas either.
