I have about 20 of these v2 (classic and black combined) devices and a pair of pano cams and notice image quality and compression is quite odd.
360p : Seems to have the best Image Quality , fluidity of motion .
SD/HD : Only perceptible difference seems to indicate overcompression in HD mode with noisey / high detail scenery (grass, tree branches etc)
While being an obvious fan of these cameras at the price point , the IQ in real time viewing seems best at 360P to be able to zoom in on animals/objects etc.
Can anyone confirm that HD over compresses and creates too many artifacts? Is this only on Live View because even the local SD recorded and Online cips show the seem artifacts and compression.
Another observation is that HD is great once the color depth and field of view is limited in Night Vision mode. Nearly all of the compression artifacts are gone , and range with an addt’l IR emitter is great.
I barely see any difference is SD vs HD. This is what I did: put an object on couch in front of cam, do max zoom and now switch between 360p SD and HD. 360p to SD seems okay but moving to HD hardly makes any difference.
What data rates are expected in SD vs HD mode ?
Ok I’ve noticed I don’t see any difference between 360p and 1080p and especially if I enlarge the picture by spreading with my fingers my face is distorted.
I’ve enclosed pic of me at front door. Quality looks good but not great identifying faces especially if you enlarge it. My tv is in 1080p but camera live view of faces looks nothing like my tv
Regarding 360p vs 1080p, on a mobile phone the screen is small enough that the human eye can’t see much difference when 1080p is at a low bitrate, 360p will often look better than 1080p when the bitrate for 360p has been tuned correctly and is typically very low. In fact 240p (think old TV) also looks great at the right bitrate. 1080p at the wrong bitrate is useless.
I think Wyze have dumbed things down too much when they use terms HD and SD in their spec. The industry definition of SD is 480p (or 576p if you are outside the USA). My vote would be that they update SD to 480p at the existing bitrate of the SD profile. People would then similarly praise SD.
Video quality comes down to the following things: resolution, frames per second, codec and bitrate.
E.g. 1080p (1080x1920), 15FPS, h.264, 1.5Mbps
Wyze should state this clearly in their spec as this is a common question is the forum.
The HD isn’t a high bitrate, but I think that’s a compromise they made due to the need for multi-day (2) continuous storage on a 32GB card.
12 hours of continuous recording on a 32GB card isn’t much use for a 6Mbps 1080p profile in my opinion. It certainly would be very useful once RTSP has been implemented or even at 3Mbps My vote is that the HD profile be updated to a higher bitrate once RTSP is live. At that point HD would not be recommended for local continuous storage perhaps. To be consistent, they could take the 480p bitrate and multiply by 4 for the HD bitrate, and rename to 1080p. Then all three profiles would be similarly tuned and adored by all.
Next, too many people have poor wifi coverage at the extremities of their homes. 2.4.Ghz G (54Mbps) is good in real life with excellent coverage for 30Mbps of system throughput. 2.4Ghz N with single client antenna (150Mbps) in real life with excellent coverage is good for maybe 100Mbps. Add a few cameras at the outside of the coverage area and things can fall apart with average or poor coverage and data rates falling off a cliff. 5Ghz doesn’t solve this as signal strength decreases more rapidly with distance and walls. Most people don’t have multiple access points so Wyze are potentially designing for this.
Regarding the published specs and bitrate, I took the published specs and reverse engineered to establish what the bitrate is for HD and SD for both day (15FPS) and night (10FPS). My post is here somewhere with all the analysis.
Loki, thanks for the link to the specs page. The issue is that Wyze have misused industry standard terms. SD and HD specifically. Why else would Wyze have felt the need to post a separate FAQ on what SD and HD means? Albeit misusing industry standard terms and miseducating readers on terminology.
SD means 480p not 1080p at a lower bitrate. HD means 720p not 1080p at a higher bitrate. FHD means 1080p. QHD means 1440p. UHD (4K) means 2160p. I recommend the vertical resolution be used for naming just like with 360p.
The spec page should also include the encoder bitrate for each resolution, e.g. 0.5Mbps. It is also possible to specify the sensor capability. E.g. if the native sensor resolution is 1080x1920 (16:9) then it’s a 2 megapixel sensor. I encourage any manufacturer to stick to industry standard terms and provide full details.
If Wyze needs a better term for 1080p low bitrate (bandwidth) then name it exactly that, “1080p (low)”.
Yeah, I know. I lobbied early on for use of something other than SD/HD for the compression rate. I wasn’t successful. I would have used SQ/HQ to keep the text label length short. Oh well, FWIW, I’m just a user like you, not a Wyze employee.
I’d like to state for the record that I, personally, DO like (& recommend) Wyze cameras, as well as own a couple Wyze v2 model cam’s.
With that said, I COMPLETELY agree with you guys, regarding the lack of specifics when it comes to labeling the different qualities of the streams.
As a recommendation to Wyze, I’m sure a lot of people would like, or even prefer, to see the video quality data that IS “HD” & “SD”, and, similarly like how @jjwatmyself had suggested, maybe instead of just “HD” as the video quality option (from within the Wyze app), if it said something along the lines of “HD - 1080p”, or, even further (like suggested), something like “HD - 1080p (low)”, would be a great help to many.
Just thought I’d second/third this topic you guys were discussing. HOPEFULLY this topic can get put into the “Wyze App Suggestion Box”, & maybe (just maybe) we’ll see this option in the future.
Thanks for discussing this topic, guys…much appreciated!
Take care
I would have used SQ/HQ to keep the text label length short. Oh well, FWIW, I’m just a user like you, not a Wyze employee.
