So the Wyze camera is sold and adverised as supporting local SD storage, which it does.
However, as I am exploring the android Wyze app, either there are a lot of local storage related bugs, or local storage seems to be purposefully ignore in order to sell subscriptions. Just a few examples:
When im notified of a motion event through android alerts, the alert takes me to an event page within the app, but there is no video unless i subscribe, even though the video exists on the sd card. There is an sd card icon on that page, but clicking on that brings up the subscription paywall, which doesnt make sense because im literally trying to get to the sd card, not the cloud.
From the camera device page, if you expand recent events, each event links to a cloud paywall instead of the recorded event on the sd card.
From the events tab, theres an event list, a thumbnail show, and a timeline. All three of these bring up the cloud paywall when it should actually go to the sd card.
From the Monitoring tab, all events are shown as images from the cloud and not from local.
In the couple of cases where you can get to the sd storage to see the events (by, say, clicking an sd card instead of a play button like youd think), they all take you to the device page with a less that useful timeline that is impossible to use conpared to the above features. And more imortantly with no way to go back to where you were before.
That has not been my experience. If I tap the Playback icon at the bottom of the screen (with the microSD card icon), the app navigates to the playback screen for that camera and plays the event…usually. Sometimes there’s quite a bit of lag before playback begins, and sometimes there’s a false error message: “No video at the selected time.” (I say “false” because the video is there, shows in the timeline, and plays back. I don’t know why the app shows these messages.) I have not seen the paywall/ad by navigating this route.
I can tap and play events listed in the Recent Events section of a camera’s Live Stream screen. I tap the event thumbnail in Recent Events, and then I tap the SD Card icon below the camera view pane (above the Recent Events list). It’s not a super-intuitive two-step process, but it seems to work. I think it would be reasonable to expect an event in the list to just begin playback when tapped, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
When I tap on an event thumbnail on the Events tab, I get a screen with an identical experience as in point #1.
I don’t know where the images on the Monitoring tab originate. I would expect them to be feeds from the cameras over the LAN to the phone (when I’m home), as other app viewing experiences are supposed to be, but I don’t know if this is the case. I really haven’t had much use for the Monitoring tab, though.
I should note that I’m not a subscriber and that I have microSD recording set to Continuous on all of my Wyze cameras.
@Crease , thanks for the response and the welcome!
I appreciate the response, but I think you may have glossed over some of the details and differences in behavior. Let me try again with a few examples:
Device playback screen: When you click on “Recent Events”, a list of pictures shows. Not videos… pictures. As you scroll through the list, it even has an ad every so often that says “Get Cam Plus to remove 5-minute cool down and record videos.”
1.a. Well, I already am recording videos… you’re just not using them.
1.b. If you take the extra step of click on SD card (which is available on this screen), you are taken to a slightly different, inferior view of the events that you cannot leave. The back button takes you back to the “My Home”.
1.c. Device-level alerts have the same behavior as 1.b. They may have just fixed a bug where the paywall was popping up when the SD Card icon was clicked on in this instance. I’ll have to test it more. It was definitely popping up because I couldn’t stop laughing at how funny that was.
The Events tab is similar to the recent events.
2.a. It shows images instead of videos, and ads show up saying “Get Cam Plus to enable back-to-back video recordings”.
2.b. Clicking any one of these takes you to the event image, which I believe is stored in the cloud.
2.c. There is a play button directly below the image, which does not play the video, but brings up the paywall instead.
2.d. If you click the image (not intuitive), then a menu will appear on the bottom with the SD Card icon. Clicking this was getting me a paywall, but I just tried it now and it takes me to the same page as in 1.b. with the same results. This time hitting the back key takes you back to the motion event, though, so that’s better than the “Recent Event”. But I think that’s almost an accident due to the way the navigation history is probably set up. Based on this, perhaps 1.b. can be fixed by making the click on “SD Card” a navigation event that can go back or else add a button to take you back.
On the top of the Events tab, there’s a button that looks like a document with a graph. This takes you to Thumbnail Show and Timeline for the device. Clicking any thumbnail takes you to Timeline.
3.a. Timeline view shows images from the cloud, not local, and shows the video on the timeline as grayed out, The previous and next buttons work for jumping between events on the timeline, but the Play button does nothing.
3.b. The bottom specifically says “Do you want to see future Videos? Try 31-day free trial”.
3.c. There are no icons from these two screens that allow navigation to the SD card as an extra step like in #1 and #2.
The Monitoring tab shows only cloud images. The play button does nothing. I assume if I subscribe, it’ll do something. And clicking on an image brings up the pay wall. There is absolutely no way to get to SD storage from this feature.
So yeah, in some cases, you can take an extra step to navigate to the SD Card from one of the screens, in some cases you can’t. In the cases where you can, there may or may not be a way to get back to where you were afterwards, at which point, you have to start from scratch (and going through 50 motion events for a night to find something specific involves a piece of paper to keep notes on which motion events have been checked and which haven’t).
I think we’re describing two different things. In your most recent point #1.b., you mention seeing event thumbnails in the RECENT EVENTS list but then tapping the SD Card control immediately below the viewer pane on the Live Stream screen. That does take you to the microSD recording timeline as you described, but that’s not what I said I did. I wrote that I tap an event thumbnail in RECENT EVENTS (which loads the event into the viewer pane and freezes it—look at the timestamp on the video if you have that enabled—showing a still preview of the event thumbnail I just tapped) and then tap the SD Card control below the viewer pane. That’s the two-step process I mentioned above. It’s weird, but a lot of things with the Wyze app are, including the unexpected “back” button behavior, as you noted. (That really frustrates me.)
Yes, the circular button that you see below an event snapshot (that you noted in point #2.c.) does prompt you to subscribe, and my understanding is that Cam Plus subscribers can tap this to play events from the cloud. As I said before, as a non-subscriber using this screen, I hit the Playback button at the bottom (with the microSD card icon), and that takes me to that camera’s microSD recording timeline and begins playing the event.
I’m aware of the THUMBNAIL SHOW but had not tried to use the TIMELINE on that screen, so I really don’t have any feedback for that. (I rarely use that screen and haven’t found it to be useful to me.)
I think you’re right about playback on the Monitoring tab. I seem to recall something about how non-subscribers get snapshots—and if, like I have, you’ve selected multiple cameras on the Monitoring tab, then you can scroll left-and-right to see vertical green bars on the timeline marking events, but these are only stills on this screen—but Cam Plus subscribers can see continuous videos as playback. They demonstrated this when they announced the redesign of the Monitoring tab, and that video shows an older version of the app. My understanding is that this is still very much a work in progress and that certain features are subscriber-only.
This part is definitely frustrating, and I agree that navigation could be improved and made more consistent. (For instance, backing out of Cam v4’s PiP just completely minimizes the app, almost like closing it (on Android). That makes no sense at all.) Maybe that should be noted in this Wishlist topic:
My options are Cam Plus and Cam Pro. No PlCam Plus Lite version.
And yeah, that’s the problem with cloud ONLY services. I can’t tell you how many times i haven’t been able to get to $10k worth of audiobooks on Audible because of some app update. Cloud is nice, but the lack of options isn’t.
Cam Pro is not available yet. Cam Plus Lite is only available if you had it prior to being discontinued. It is grandfathered and only available to older cameras up to Cam V3.
If you signed up for Cam Plus Lite prior to March 2022, you can still continue to use the service. However, Cam Plus Lite is no longer available to new users.
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button that you see below an event snapshot (that you noted in point 