As of yesterday I’ve started seeing a message “The time on your phone and your camera’s time stamp don’t match. Would you like to sync your time stamp to your phone now?” I select ‘Sync time’ and the timestamp on the video seems to match local time. I’ve checked the Advanced settings for the camera and ‘Sync’ is selected.
I’m not sure what has changed if anything on my end. The camera is remote but in the same timezone as the phone. It’s a big problem because among other things the notification timestamps seem to be off.
Thanks.
Edit: Problem solved. Evidently the camera gets the time from the local time of the smart phone. It continues with this time even after disconnecting. I was using an Android emulator whose time zone did not match my local time zone.
The problems are, I never saw that message before yesterday after months of use. I also seem to have to do this each time I enter the App for each video stream I look at. Also the timestamps on my notifications lists are incorrect and set to some other time, maybe in China?
I did start using an Android emulator yesterday where I first noticed the problem but this is also a problem on my smartphone now. There is a certain amount of inconsistency in this however in that some selected video streams bring up the dialogue and some don’t. I also restarted one of the cameras but the problem persists.
The Android emulator seems like a big clue. Is it possible the emulator’s “clock” is set to the wrong time zone and has updated some of your cameras to that zone?
More experimentation. I get this problem when I go back and forth between the Android emulator on my desktop and the smartphone. If after sync’ing I stay in one or the other the dialogue doesn’t appear. One time however I had to select the Sync button in Advance Settings to change the timestamp.
I’m not sure what Wyze is trying to accomplish with the timestamp. Is this added on the viewing of the video stream (versus recorded)? What is the timestamp supposed to be, local time of the camera or local time of the viewer?
The timestamp is inserted by the camera, so it is whatever time is last synced to the camera.
I just did a little experiment. I’m in the EDT time zone. I just manually changed my phone to PDT time zone. When I connected to a camera, I got that message. When I confirmed to allow it to sync time, the timestamp displayed on the live view I was simultaneously watching on my iPad changed to three hours earlier.
Conclusion: whatever device last synced it’s time to the camera is the time the camera is going to display.
Again, I would strongly suspect that the time in your Android emulator is not set to the same local time as your phone and cameras.
Yes, I kind of agree. As it is now, if you travel and your phone changes time zones, you would be getting the time disagreement warning each time. At least you can dismiss it for 7 days. I’m kind of surprised we don’t hear more complaints from travelers about this.
An alternative would be to set the timezone in the firmware and have the camera do it’s own time server ping. I don’t know if that’s feasible in the hardware/firmware, but I’ve added it to Wyze’s feature request tracker.
In my view, timezone should be selectable: a) UTC time b) local time of camera c) local time of viewer (which it currently how it works). For most people the local times of the camera and the phone are the same but for remote applications they are not which case a) or b) makes the most sense to me.
I am told by Wyze that time zone setting in the camera, with camera ping of time server, is under consideration. However, with everything else being developed, it won’t be for at least a couple of major firmware/app updates.
Well I’m good now that I know what’s going on and can wait. It might be nice to add how this works in the FAQ including the Sync in Advanced Settings. It also wasn’t clear to me when that Sync dialogue and don’t ask for 7 days meant when they came up.
I’m really happy to be able to use an Android Emulator though. Best solution IMO would be to open the interface to the camera for stream viewing and to be able to save video off camera onto a local server. It’s the old proprietary issue in an another form. The user/community can then provide the interface so many are clamoring for. That will be a wait for sure if it ever happens.