Any idea why 1 hour was missing from a car broken in?

Cameras
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The camera only captured BEFORE and AFTER.

There is 1 hour missing in-between where there was no recording at all.

Any idea?

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Were you using continuous recording to a good SD card in the cam or just event recording?

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There are a few things that affect this.

  1. Sensitivity settings. These determine how much movement must be seen in the camera pixels for something to be considered enough “movement” to count as an “event” worth recording. The higher it is (ie:100%), the less motion is needed to trigger it.
  2. Motion inside a vehicle will be stifled a little because of the metal blocking the movement, and the glass potentially distorting viewing to some degree. It will also partially depend on the angle of the camera to the vehicle.
  3. It partially depends what camera model you are using. Wyze Outdoor Cam is based on a PIR sensor, which would be blocked while the person is inside the car.
  4. It depends on if you were relying on nightvision or not and what the lighting conditions were. The IR is effective to a certain range, and movement sensitivity isn’t always as strong in night vision. Also, when the lighting conditions are low, the camera pixel changes aren’t as dramatic, especially through a car which also obfuscates the viewing.
  5. Distance. It depends how far away the vehicle is from the camera. The farther away, the harder it will be to pick up movement inside the car.
  6. Detection Zones. I don’t think this applies to your situation, but just to be thorough for future reference I’ll mention detection zones sometimes make a difference why something may not have been recorded as desired. If the event occurs outside the detection zone or moves outside a detection zone, then event recording can cease until things come back within that zone again.
  7. SD card: Do you have one? Is it set to Events only (that’s why it probably didn’t record while they were in the car as mentioned in the above points) or is it set on continuous recording? If it is set to continuous recording, it probably did record them inside of the car, but it won’t show this in the “Events” tab. Instead, what you will want to do, is go back to the first event of them breaking into your car. Now at the bottom of that video recording there should be an icon labeled “Playback” and if you click on that, then it will take you to the SD card recording (instead of just the cloud recording) in the exact spot you want to look at, and there you will be able to watch the ENTIRE break-in, including while they were inside your car. I’m hoping that is the case for you and that this solves your issue. You can also access the SD card recordings by going to the live stream area of the camera click “View Playback” at the bottom, then navigating to the correct date and time to find the video you’re looking for.

There are a few other things that could’ve contributed to the above situation, but those are the most probable. Obviously something crazy like your camera rebooting or losing power or internet or something like that could always have happened, but I am guessing that is not the case.

If you have a camera model that will do continuous recording to an SD card, and you don’t currently have an SD card, I would get one. I have SD cards in all my cams that support them and I set them to continuous recording. Once that is the case, they always record everything, even if the normal cloud events don’t due to the sensitivity or detection settings.

I hope what you did capture can help you or law enforcement be able to recover your losses.
I hope that helps give you some ideas of things that might help in the future.
Best of luck.

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I would add
8. The cameras do not work as intended. Miss events all the time including walking right in front of them, SD card or not.

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Hmm…for #8 I guess I would add, that it depends on whether you have Cam plus or the 12-second cloud option. If there was recently movement that triggered a 12-second event, then it is true that a person could walk right in front of the camera and there would not be a cloud event for at least 5 more minutes. that is a good clarification to make for someone wondering why there would be events so far apart and not showing in the middle.
Number 9 could be related to the router, router settings, modem, network range/strength, or ISP issues. I used to have this issue…especially related to cloud events.
number 10 could be to make sure the SD card is good quality.

With my over 2 dozen cams I would say they are pretty reliable for me and work as intended, especially with the SD card on continuous recording, because then it always records whether there is any motion or not, so it always records regardless of whether there is currently internet available (which cloud events won’t do) or any other similar variable. The only time I really ever have functional or recording issues is when I load non-production beta testing firmware to help test things out, or if there is an Amazon outage or something like that. But between the cloud and SD card I’ve pretty much always got a recording unless the power goes out so it can’t keep recording.

If anyone has cameras not recording when they are supposed to, I would check the above variables first and then definitely recommend sending in a log about it and reaching out to Support:

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

(206) 339-9646, or you can chat with an agent or create a ticket on the support site.
4 am - 6 pm PT Monday through Friday, and 8 am - 4 pm PT Saturday.

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Hmmm.

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Thank you. I will check to see if it works. I had sd card and recording was on continuous with web cam subscription.

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…I had something very similar happen this past week to 2 of my V2 cams, I have cam plus, correctly formatted sd cards, detection zones set, smart detection for person on, and good wifi connection, but, my 2 front yard cams missed someone break into 3 vehicles in my driveway in broad daylight. The timeframe the breakin occurred was 7:42-7:57 am, my neighbors cams caught them before and after me is how I have the timeline. No cloud video is shown and when i pulled the sd cards to view them, they showed “unreadable, storage device corrupted” on both cams. None of my other cams missed any other events and all their cards were good. I’m baffled.

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Is it possible WiFi jammers were used?

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Jammers and/or WPA2 de-authentication attacks shouldn’t have corrupted the SD card though? It would be nice if someone tested this. You also might be able to recover something from the cards with tools on a PC.

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I know for a fact that deauth attacks do not corrupt the uSD card. With that said, I also know that certain playback or connection issues will cause your camera to go wonky, which can cause odd SD card behavior. For me, these issues happen on rare occasions when I do not give the application time to finish a request.

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