Are you recording motion only or 24/7? I’m thinking I’ll be motion only.
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All my cams are set to continuous recording. All are outside, in a case under eaves in Arizona.
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What type of motion you are recording be it , person , pet , package , 24/7 etc motion has no bearing on the type of card you use
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I bought the Wyze branded cards which was the forum recommendation at that time. Nobody was getting reliable recording but the prevailing thought was at least the company would support the card when it failed. I got one for each camera. They would take turns pretending the card had disappeared, pretending it needed to be reformatted, failing to record, refusing to rewind, deciding the card was empty, deciding it was almost full, thinking it was ejected, etc. After the first couple of dozen times fighting it I gave up and I just pretend they don’t have SD card slots. Some others have had better luck.
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I’ve heard different, that when continuous recording they have cards that are better suited for the constant overwrite. I figure while only recording motion it will have much less.
So with a micro sd card in the pan cams will I be stuck with the 12 second clips like the cloud recordings or will I get all motion recordings full length without a cool down?
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Thanks for clarifying Jason21271. However, I don’t know what to believe because I was having no 5-minute cool down before. I’m not making this up. There was one time that I was working in my garage with a friend of mine and I have showed him that it got every motion captured in recordings and he was amazed how great such a cheap (in price) camera can do. Another time during the Xmas break in 2019 when I was at an Airbnb room for a week, I setup a cam there and it captured every motion detected without the 5-minute cool down in order to see someone came in to take my laptop when I was not there. I had no gap between minutes on all those recordings. And on every Wyze cam that I had, I never seen any recording with the 5-6 minute gap until recently or when Cam Plus was available which I don’t know when but to guess.
If there’s a 5-minute cool down from day one, I really don’t know how to explain what I got, unless Wyze had a firmware bug that allowed that basic feature to work for me by accident or was I lucky. I really don’t know what more to say than explaining a few examples. I wish I have captured the event date/time before to show you.
Until I have missed every important events recently, I was so disappointed so I posted this to find that this was never a basic feature from day one. I wouldn’t have purchased so many Wyze cams if that was not my experience.
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For this were you looking in playback? Or in the event tab? Reading through these posts here I think folks are bluring the lines between sd card local storage and cloud recording (free, camplus). The 12 second clip 5 minute cool down ONLY applies to the free cloud service and are viewed through the event tab. If you are viewing your local storage in “playback”, there is no cool down.
Edit, also were the clips you were showing your friend only 12 seconds in length? Exactly one minute?
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I believe in his above post he said he has not used any sd card.
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Yep thanks, I see that also. I wish it was more common practice for folks that when they refer to “event recordings”, to append that with “sd card event recording” or “camplus event recordings” etc to reduce confusion. Maybe there was free trial of camplus at play here? Trying to troubleshoot it out.
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No Tony, I can attest that “multiple cloud recordings within 5 minute cooldown without CMC/CamPlus” is a thing that sometimes happens/happened. I posted some evidence a few months ago. Nice occasional bonus.
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Interesting! thanks for the update. Was there any events that happened to make that start or stop that you can recall? Setting up new cameras? new firmware/app version?
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Nope, my setup is pretty much frozen in amber. No updates. The only thing that changed was all the flag flapping. (It’s down now.). I don’t know whether it continued to happen or not. I’ve not tested.
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jaketheone46 was correct - thanks for answering for me. I did not have SD card in any of my cams, it’s all the default 12-sec recordings from Events tab w/o any add-on like Camplus, multiple 12-sec recordings within the same minute and next. That’s why it’s hard for me to believe that was not the basic feature from beginninng when I first started using Wyze cams and why suddenly showing 5-6 minute gaps recently.
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What I had before was definitely not free Camplus trial and probably Camplus was not even available at that time. I just ordered another black cam in Oct and finally had time to set it up in the last couple of weeks and Camplus free trial was activated for a week and now it expired few days ago. I sure could see the difference on what Camplus gave me but I really don’t need any of the Camplus features other than just the no cool down as a basic feature of the camera. Without this basic feature, the camera is basically useless with 5-minute cool down since you will just miss all your important events within 5 minutes. I still have a couple of Foscam cams which I could set up to email me a sequence of still snapshots that captures every motion detected without cool down, and it’s still useful than the free 5-minute cool down. Well, enough has been said. I know every one has his/her specific needs but the “no cool” is really my specific need even if it only captures still images instead of a 12-second recording.
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I don’t understand why there is a five-minute “cool down“ between events even when we’re using our own SD card to record everything.
I don’t have time to sit there and watch five minutes of video after each event to see if any other event occurred.
The cool down only effects the cloud based free 12 second/ 5 min cool down recordings. Cloud based (camplus, free) and sd card local storage (event only, continuous) are completely seperate things. You can have one, both or neither.
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Sounds like what happened was not supposed to happen and you got lucky and had it for the time that you did. It was a bug or malfunction of the system that removed the cool down of the free recordings. The cloud based services that Wyze offers are the free 12 sec/ 5 min cool down videos, and camplus videos.
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Well, I wanted to thank everyone for sharing the experience with me. With the confirmation from many of you, I think I got lucky but at the same time it’s like a bait to get me in to buying many more cameras to a disappointment at the end. I would rather see the reality at the beginning so I could make the right choice.
Now, I’m looking into experimenting the SD card like others have shared to see if it works for me or should I pay the extra per month to get the Camplus for only the needed basic feature or should I look for other brands of cameras again.
Have indoor Cams pointing out, work great, but notifys me of person motion up to ten mins after motion, useless . Had outdoor ones, but cool down period also seemed useless capturing motion accurately. SDcard installed. Besides that, I still love the products. But would like everything to work properly before I volunteer to pay for a service…
Do you have Android? Have you looked into other threads in here about Android notification delays if so?