View On PC/Browser (Windows / Mac / Chromebook)

That’s the case for everyone who plugs in a backup drive, which is everyone I know, and all of my IT customers. If you don’t have backups, clearly your data is worthless, so no loss.

 

"If you don’t have backups, clearly your data is worthless, so no loss."
Many people are just simple ignorant about how important a backup drive is, until it's too late.

A few weeks ago a frantic woman told me her computer wouldn’t start, and she needed to get all of her pictures off of it. She said there were countless pictures of her children since they were born on the computer. I told her the pictures would also be on her backup hard drive. She said “What’s a backup hard drive?”. So no, I disagree with you, her pictures were not worthless, and it was a great loss to her, but no one told her how important backing up your computer is.

A lot of people don’t worship the backup god, until they lose files important to them. It’s sad, but it happens everyday.

And for those people, online storage is even more important since statistically its much more reliable than singular local storage with no backup. I mean, then it IS a backup.

 

"online storage is even more important since statistically its much more reliable than singular local storage"
Your opinion is different from fact.

Online is especially worse when your connection to the Internet is very slow, or your Internet connection is metered. These two issues make it very difficult to backup online successfully. Not a problem with local backup. A RAID or NAS setup would be ideal. Try backing up online when the Internet goes down. Not a problem with local backup :slight_smile:

None of which addresses what I said, but thanks for trying over and over again.

 

Yep, since what you said is only your opinion and not fact, it can’t be addressed. It’s like they say ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.’ Weird.

 

 

It’s my observation, not opinion, having been in this business for over 30 years.

 

Thank you everyone for the discussion and feedback! (I am definitely watching, even if I don’t have the chance right now to be fully involved.)

I just hooked up my first Wyze Cam Pan this morning and everything seems to be working fine. The software was updated immediately.

I came to the website this morning on my computer to check out the setup only to find that I can’t view from a website, only my phone. I currently have two cameras from another company monitoring portions of my home and I do have access on my phone and website on that setup. Having an online component would be something that I strongly suggest going forward.

This is also something i would like to have as well. Local NAS and web view are 2 things that would make this a top contender for more expensive cough nest cough devices and maybe even take them down a peg.

Nest is insanely over-priced, but the people buying it are looking for online storage. If you stand in Best Buy and yell “$500 for the first person who can explain what a NAS is” you will walk out with your $500.

I’ve never even looked to see if Nest cameras allow direct connections; do they? There’s no chance I’d buy their stuff, or Ring, or similar.

 

I used to work for them, and no they don’t offer local nas compatibility. I know that I personally Upsold a lot of extra cloud storage subscriptions just because they don’t have a way to capture the stream and store it locally. They also use public key encryption so without the private decrypt key stored in the server the compressed and encrypted video stream is effectively unreadable. I like the 14 day alert cloud storage on here I just want a way to capture and store full video locally for my own use. More than 32Gb at a time.

I’ll bet $100 that the “upsell cloud services” trick is where Wyze is going. This is why I don’t think we will ever see any really open access. It is what it is. If they did, then they’d be eating the market currently dominated by Foscam and similar products. I don’t think anyone can afford to sell $20 open cameras long term.

 

"I just want a way to capture and store full video locally for my own use. More than 32Gb at a time."
 

This firmware is supposed to allow Wyze cameras to work with a NAS.

I talked with the developers and they said it works fine with Wyze V2, but hasn’t been tested yet with the Wyze Cam Pan model.

In the next few weeks I will be testing it with a Synology NAS, using their Surveillance Station 8.1;

Will update as I learn more.

 

Last time I looked into it, there were two problems with it:

Loss of Wyze cloud-based notifications and clips. You may not care, but yes, I wanted my cake after eating it too.

Limited to 720 resolution instead of 1080.

Do you know if those are still limitations to the OpenIPC firmware? Also is there a path back for V2? Again, when I last looked, I didn’t see documentation on reverting the V2 camera if you wanted to go back.

 

Carlos I wasn’t aware of the resolution issue. I will contact them again and get a clarification regarding this.

I’m only interested in 1080 and above.

As far as the path goes, as soon as my Cam Pan arrives I will be looking into coping the firmware. It should be pretty straight forward.

I will be posting documentation about it for everyone in a separate thread later.

I forgot to list the most important problem; auto night mode stops working. I just looked on Github and the resolution limit is 1600x900, no auto night mode, and there’s no section on how to revert (it’s for V1 and doesn’t mention V2). Since we’re talking about a $20 camera, so I may do it anyway, but currently working on other hacking priorities (Raspberry Pi to interface between Homekit and unauthorized wi-fi and Z-Wave devices).

 

If Tiny cam pro can access the cameras that tells me 3rd party apps should be able to. I put tiny cam pro on my Fire TV and turned on the web server function. Only problem is Fire TV doesn’t stay on unless you actively are using it so this option didn’t really work. Looking now for a cheap android phone that I can put Tiny Cam on on leave the phone plugged into power and hope that the web server doesn’t use power faster than it can charge. In fact I might have an old cell phone that I can use for that… Hmmm where did I put it.

Point is this shouldn’t be that hard. If one 3rd party can do it, others certainly should be able to.

It means that there is an IP and port that will respond in a specific way when given a specific command. If Tinycam was helped by Wyze (no idea if they were) then maybe they got encryption keys, command documentation, and the like. So “should be able to” is hard to say. I haven’t packet sniffed the traffic to see what it is, that would give answers.

I’m going to ask about this on the Security Spy NVR forums.

 

I am new here and just set up my 1st WyzeCamPan last night and I have to say I’m impressed with the features this camera has for the price. I too would love to see a robust PC/Mac web app for your products. Something with email notifications along with optional cloud storage options would be great. I would definitely be a paid subscriber if and when that is implemented. But for now, I’m liking what I am seeing from WyzeCam and will be setting up the rest of my cameras tonight :slight_smile:

Lou