We should all stop calling this a cooldown period, it is a TIMEOUT To limit storage requirements
After all you can record 24-7 on a sd card or if you pay for cam plus
All they have to do is tell us how many hours of monthly storage is included free, let us decide how to use that, and then market additional subscriptions PER CAMERA or PER ACCOUNT of 24-48-or 72 hour monthly upgrades. That solves the revenue problem and is not dishonest. They just need to stop calling it a COOL DOWN…
12 Seconds recording, followed by the FIVE MINUTE BLACKOUT, is by design.
To annoy you to purchase a CamPlus Subscription to remove the Crippling feature placed on the Camera by Wyze.
It’s sort of like selling a low cost junk InkJet Printer… the Printer Companies know they can practically give away the printer, because they’ll make all their money selling ink to the consumer…
Perhaps Wyze is the inkjet salesperson of surveillance cameras?
SJ
Not true, this is false information , the 12 second recording, followed by the 5 minute cooldown. Was introduced in 2017 with the first wyze cameras when Cam plus was not even thought of yet.
The Cam plus features are additional features that you can choose to subscribe to , or not ,. at your discretion
Like @HDRock said, the 12 seconds every 5-minute cycle was put in place long before Cam Plus was even thought of. It was done because a camera company that had VERY thin margins on a very inexpensive camera could not afford to pay for unlimited cloud storage for its users forever after the sale. This duty cycle was a way to keep those storage requirements down (and to keep users from being irritated by thousands of swinging tree branch clips, lol).
Cam Plus came about as a way to quell user dissatisfaction with the above business model, which as it turns out would have shuttered Wyze anyway. They needed help paying for the extra storage required, and users said they were willing.
You can always watch as much of the incident as you like from the SD card for free.
Hello HDRock,
I stand corrected, it appears to be a ONE MINUTE not Five Minutes as I stated in error.
My frustration remains the same be it ONE MINUTE or FIVE MINUTES.
The fact that my camera goes DARK on this feature for ONE MINUTE makes the camera nothing but a toy for the most part…. UNLESS I PAY FOR a CAMPLUS Subscription per camera.
12 seconds on… ONE MINUTE BLACKOUT, Resulting in missing the Hawk in my birdbath, The Coyote running up or down the hill, the raccoons drinking from the birdbath… perhaps a someone stealing something off the doorstep during that one minute of DOWN TIME.
I understand I can still record data to the SD Card I have in the camera, but accessing the data on the SD Card requires one to pull the SD card and using a PC/Mac to get to it? (Haven’t done this, so correct me if there is a means to access the MicroSD card, in full across my network)
I have four Amcrest camera’s… two floodlight (ASH-26W’s… and two IP2M-841B-V3), all four have MicroSD cards, and without a subscription, I can easily access all recordings on the MicroSD card without have it to pull those cards to do so.
Having full access to my recordings be it on the MicroSD cards, via RTSP, via ONVIF, via browser on my windows PC or any other 3rd party app, would be preferred to the following:
Record for 12 Seconds…. BLACKOUT FOR ONE MINUTE, record for 12 seconds… BLACKOUT FOR ONE MINUTE.
SJ
You can access continuous recording 24/7 to your SD card for free by going to the camera’s live stream page in portrait mode, and pressing the “View Playback” button at the bottom. Then dial up the time using the timeline at the bottom of the picture. A reverse-pinch on the timeline will get you smaller timeline increments.
Or, during the 12-second clip you can jump to that exact time of the incident on the SD card by pressing the SD card icon at the bottom of the 12-second clip when it is in portrait mode.
Then you can watch as much of the incident as you like. For free. 
And from there, one can browse for all the recordings “missed” by the cooldown.
I really don’t understand why people complain about this. It costs to host all those recorded video files online. If one doesn’t want to pay that cost, then host the files yourself for free.
I wouldn’t complain if I COULD host my recorded files on my NAS (FOR FREE, at No Cost to WYZE).
I PREFER to host my files for free on my QNAP TVS-1282 NAS… If there is a way to redirect all of my video to my Local NAS, and not to the WYZE servers, I would be more than happy to do my part to relieve the Wyze Servers from my 15 cameras.
IF there is a means to do this, or to use Blue Iris with the Camera’s do do the same, just the storage on my local PC or NAS, please share how to do so.
I’m can only assume that WYZE will not let me host my video for free on my NAS, because, then I wouldn’t need to Pay for a Wyze Cam Plus Subscription.
SJ
You know you can make your NAS drive appear as uSD card?
I’m confused how paying for a Cam Plus subscription fixes the NAS issue in any way. Your SD card comes closer.
My take is that he thinks Wyze is subtly steering customers to Cam Plus by not implementing RTSP on V3. Maybe, maybe not, it’s conjecture.
But if all he wants is to save event video files to his NAS drive, he could. He’d need to do some configuration work, but it appears he’s a technical guy.
Hello Ipil60R34s,
I’m not familiar with this uSD setup you referenced, can you share with us how we go about setting that up?
SJ
I haven’t tried it myself, but it was mentioned here in the forums. Basically you tinker with the camera to redirect μSD I/O to an NFS share. So you need to mount your NAS as an NFS.
I’ve toyed around with WyzeHacks and it’s very finicky. The NFS is difficult to implement in a Windows environment. Not for beginners.
I expected it to be finicky on the Windows side. Most things that cross over from linux to Windows are like that. But is it finicky on the camera side?
You don’t really want to run a server on Windows 24X7. Windows has too much UI overhead for that. I wonder if NFS runs satisfactorily on raspberry pi 4 with an SSD?
I follow the github and there are lots of finicky issues on all sides of this. Great project and fun implementation, but not really workable, IMO.
Nonetheless, it is a blackout and not a cool down. This is true because if you use the cams Plus subscription you can get 24/7 monitoring and somehow magically the camera does not need cooldowns anymore when you’re paying for the subscription
Cooldown is just the word they chose for forced downtime. It does not mean the camera has to physically cool.
Of course that is true since the cams Plus can operate 24/7 with no supposed to cool down. I really wish the company would change that term to “pause” because that’s what it really is, and we all know it’s simply an effort to limit big storage costs online
Yes, they have been clear from the beginning about what it is. Like I said in response #4:
The 12 seconds every 5-minute cycle was put in place long before Cam Plus was even thought of. It was done because a camera company that had VERY thin margins on a very inexpensive camera could not afford to pay for unlimited cloud storage for its users forever after the sale. This duty cycle was a way to keep those storage requirements down (and to keep users from being irritated by thousands of swinging tree branch clips, lol).
Cam Plus came about as a way to quell user dissatisfaction with the above business model, which as it turns out would have shuttered Wyze anyway. They needed help paying for the extra storage required, and users said they were willing.
You can always watch as much of the incident as you like from the SD card for free.
I doubt they will change the terminology, because cooldown is what it has always been called, in all the documentation that ever referred to it.