Camera has been offline. No notifications

p2788deal · April 18, 2025, 4:01am

The udp is only within the lan. It doesn’t say the udp stream is video.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:06am

For reference, these are the v4 connections still uses their old hosting, probably cheaper. They make a lot more connections for whatever reason.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:08am

There is no within the LAN, my cams are segmented with no possible LAN communication, and you can clearly see the destination is AWS. These stats are from the WAN interface of my router (not that it matters, the router does not convert UDP to TCP or vice-versa).

Streaming video uses UDP, it is the most efficient and lowest latency protocol and is ideal for streaming video and audio.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:08am

Here is the Panv3, very similar to the v4

p2788deal · April 18, 2025, 4:09am

Again, what makes you think these udp streams is video?

chris.convis · April 18, 2025, 4:10am

Dave, kindly, I have already stated “I would expect this” which basically is the same thing as saying “I assumed that this exists”. It doesn’t take much to figure out that this really means:

“ i assumed that this existed and I just learned that it does not”.

So yes. I assumed that this basics alert function exists since Wyze already has

person detection
Package detection
Car detection
Bird detection
Fart detection

I do appreciate you defending Wyze but I’m confused with your assertions. Sure I pay for a cheap camera but at this point I’ve paid them more in subscriptions costs.

I would like to know if your opinions are shaped by your experience with the app. Do you open the app often and frequently on regular intervals? I do not. I need to be prompted by something like “oh shoot did I close the garage” or “I forget if I closed the back gate” to open my app. My opinions are shaped by my specific and unique use case for this as well as similar use case of other cloud enabled devices.

I would like to know: if you happened to ignore your Wyze app for several weeks and you discovered someone broke in and stole your blender, then you went to look at video recordings but you found out that all your cameras were offline, would you be ok with this? Because that is what we all bought.

chris.convis · April 18, 2025, 4:14am

At least I know I’m not the only one who would value the alert.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:15am

They pop up only when watching video (live stream or SD card) only.
They are high bandwidth (the TCP streams are barely anything)
They connect to the ports that Wyze has reported as being for video streaming
Watching on a sniffer and seeing encoded video in the payload
The fact that UDP is the right protocol to use for video streaming, TCP would be very inefficient and likely result in jittery video with audio synch issues and a delay.

What has you so convinced they are NOT video? It is exactly what one would expect to see for a video stream, I’m not sure why you think it isn’t possible?

chris.convis · April 18, 2025, 4:18am

I appreciate your discussion but can we table this UDP vs TCP video stream and time stamping stuff? Really love it and I’m learning a lot but we need to get back to the original debate.:

Should Wyze alert you if your cameras experience an outage and go offline for whatever reason.

The current vote is still
For - 3
Against - 0
Undecided - 1

Per the bylaws of our newly found board I need 10% of membership to vote to bring to the Wyze bossperson.

p2788deal · April 18, 2025, 4:25am

Because you’re not streaming hundreds of videos. What makes you think you need of all these separate paths to send a few video streams?

Look at any ftp stream and you realize this is false.

Have you ever coded anything beyond book example comm programs and actually deployed it?

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:29am

I disagree that they’re the same, but semantics I guess. Expecting means you have a reason, assumption doesn’t.

Those features are subscription related, they also have lots of other features (both for subscribers and non-subscribers). Not sure how those relate though.

While it may seem that way, I’m not. Look for anywhere I mention the wishlist and say basically it is ignored and don’t hold your breath. I agree this would be a useful feature, they even have all the mechanisms already in place. But budget for new app development (which is likely mostly outsourced) is going to be put into features that will sell cameras and especially subscriptions. If they added a feature saying “notification when your cams are offline” do you really think that would get them a bunch of new paying subscribers? Hell the cam notifies you when you go into the live stream that the SD card is having an issue, why can’t it send a notification for that? Again, useful feature, not holding my breath.

Which is for a specific set of features that were listed when you decided to pay. The offline notification shouldn’t rely on having a subscription, but if they did implement it, I suspect it might be a subscriber only feature.

If you look at competing cams (especially the popular ones like Ring and Blink), while Ring may or may not notify you that the cam is offline, both platforms are significantly more expensive and lack a lot of features these cams have. It is always going to be a tradeoff with inexpensive devices like these. Only so much funding available and it has to be put where it will have the greatest ROI.

Nope, once or twice a week. Back in the beginning it was more often. I do like getting notifications from one cam that someone/something is at my front door, that’s really my main use these days. I’ve never had a cam offline even once in 2 years. Maybe because I have them scheduled to reboot once a week.

And that’s fine, I’m not arguing that your opinion that it would be a useful feature is wrong, I agree with you. I’m saying your expectation doesn’t make sense given no evidence in support of it.

Actually I probably would be ok since unless there was a power outage, they still record to the SD card, and mine all have SD cards in them with continuous recording. Certainly not ideal, but as long as I can recover the footage, I’m happy. I guess I’ve tempered my expectations, what I get out of them is worth more than I spent on them, and to me that makes a good value. If I was in a high crime area or was a drug dealer, I would have a totally different system.

Again, notifications of any issues with the camera would be a great thing to have. No disagreement there. I was just questioning your “expectation” and why you had it. Maybe assumption would have been a better word in the original post.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:39am

Load balancing, web view, etc. If you wait long enough many of them drop off as they aren’t needed. The rest are due to the fact that there is more than just the video stream. There is the initial heartbeat connection that never goes away, an online status that gets sent to a 3rd party that tells google, amazon, etc the status of your cam, some control and other status messages, etc. They have a document listing what each port is for.

I said THE TCP streams. The ones in my post. Those are barely any bandwidth on my sniffer, which makes sense since they’re just authentication and some controls. Yes, I’m aware that TCP is used for many high bandwidth things that require “reliable” delivery. That’s not what we’re discussing here.

I’ve been a network engineer for over 25 years, have looked at more packet captures than I care to remember, and my job every day is designing networks to deliver ultra low latency multicast stock market data over UDP.

Not trying to have a measuring contest, just saying you’re out of your element here, this is one you should probably step back on.

Heck if you don’t want to listen to me, just google the “wyze ports” doc, it will confirm what I’m saying. If you don’t believe them either, well, no point in discussing further. Set up your own sniffer, and watch the undeniable video encoded payload in the UDP packets.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:44am

Unfortunately the wyze bossperson is the “wish list”. Best of luck with that one.

I guess I’m just trying to set your expectations. Many will say that wyze employees quietly monitor these forums looking for new features to add. But experience tells me, if they do bring those features to the bean counters, they get shot down. I also get the idea that their headcount and resources were severely reduced over the past 12 to 18 months.

I hope I’m in the “for” count. Not that it will count for anything. I suppose I’m just saying, whatever features your cam has day 1, don’t expect anything beyond that. While there are improvements and tweaks, I don’t think I’ve seen a new feature added to any of my cams in 2 years. New cams may come with new features, but existing ones have not gotten any new ones. In reality, the new 3.x app really didn’t add much feature wise, was more of a re-arrangement of the old app.

p2788deal · April 18, 2025, 4:47am

Load balancing means you reassign things, not break them up. Again, streaming a few videos does not require hundreds of of paths like this.

You obviously don’t understand ftp. ftp uses 2 tcp/ip paths. It doesn’t use udp at all.

So the answer is no, you haven’t coded anything like this, much less deployed system you helped develop.

This reminds of one engagement. One team member claimed he knew video streaming. I asked him to code a simple example. He came back with something that downloads a video file and then sent to vlc to play. I think he even lifted the code from an academic book.

You know what usually uses udp? ntp. I bet those entries are.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 4:58am

Yes, you’re right, NTP takes over 1 megabit per second continuously and coincidentally only happens while watching video, then it stops.

None of your other statements about hundreds of streams, breaking streams up (never said that) or FTP being somehow related are making any sense, if you’re not going to take the time to read what I’m trying to explain, or are going to use partial, out of context quotes as some sort of proof of something, there is no point in trying any further.

You can easily confirm this for yourself, do what you will.

Seriously, the ports are right in what I posted. NTP is UDP port 123. Do you see that on all the UDP connections?

chris.convis · April 18, 2025, 5:16am

I love how we are debating the difference in terms of expectation vs assumption. I went ahead and double checked definitions and I stand by what I originally said. I would expect a feature like this.

Expectation was an appropriate use here. You may be misconstruing and reading too much into me and levying your own expectations on my actions as a consumer.

It is correct to say “I assume it has this feature “
While at the same time it is correct to say
“ I would have expected it to do this”. Which is only different in agency and time. It still is saying the same thing because we are talking about past events and what truly transpired.

PS I’m going to make both Dave and P mentors of mine to learn more about networks and coding since my background is aerospace.

chris.convis · April 18, 2025, 5:20am

Furthermore my expectation does make sense because (as I’ve qualified before) in my experience, other cloud enabled hardware which have applications and mobile interfaces and accounts…. Will alert you if said hardware device goes offline.

My solar inverter system by Enphase does this. This is based on prior experience with a system/device that appears to have similar connectivity basics. As a lowly median consumer who is marginally tech savvy it is 100% appropriate for me to use the term “expect”. And that will hold up in court. At least maybe for another week or so

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 5:28am

Yeah, but how much did that cost?

Whatever, semantics or otherwise, unfortunately it isn’t a feature that exists within the Wyze ecosystem.

There are free monitoring sites out there, and you could theoretically map each camera to a different port on your router and have them all monitored with email, text, or phone alerts. You could also do this from inside your network using various software programs, but that would be less reliable as if your internet went down, you wouldn’t get the alert (though I guess that isn’t as big of an issue as if your cam froze and went offline). What I’m not sure about is whether that frequent probing would cause any issue with the cam, typically not but haven’t tried with this type of device.

But I’d recommend setting an automation to reboot your cams periodically and see if that is enough. I only do mine once a week, partially because that has been plenty, and partially because two of my cams are Pan cams and every time they reboot, they bottom out against the stops for a few seconds to calibrate and I’d be concerned with the wear and tear of doing that every day. But for non-pan cams, probably no reason you couldn’t have them reboot every day at 3AM or whatever.

Obviously this probably won’t fix a cam that has gone offline, the idea is more to prevent it from getting to the point where it goes offline, assuming it was due to some issue that builds up over time in the cam, like memory or something, and wasn’t due to a brief power blip or some other infrequent incident that causes it to lock up right then and there.

p2788deal · April 18, 2025, 5:41am

Someone who haven’t done any network programming in the real world claiming this? That’s a laugh.

You throw out 25 years, I have more than that, in the actual field. In fact, I’ve delivered a video dashboard for a line of industrial-strength cameras.

Edit -

To clarify, the application ran on Windows, was a front-end and controlled another windows box, running a Windows server. It was meant for a security firm, map-based and each camera was in direct communication with the other cameras. In theory, it would have been able to follow an intruder while roaming a protected area. This was some years ago.

The application designed to run remote (from the site or from the windows server), that’s why networking capability was important.

dave27 · April 18, 2025, 5:53am

I went to the moon with Elvis. Neither of which is relevant to what is being discussed here.

If by “network” you mean network TV, no I have no experience with that, but that also has nothing to do with streaming video from a wyze cam (though I’d be willing to bet they use UDP to stream their data to satellites and transmitters). If you mean computer networking, again, you seem to not read what people write. I do it every day.

Regardless of any and all of that, the wyze video stream is UDP (as is pretty much every other video stream out there). Well documented (though some of the wyze pages are incorrect stating some things are TCP when they’re clearly UDP above, like port 10001), and if you don’t trust the documents, you can observe it on your network. Or just block UDP and try to access your video stream from cellular, another easy way to confirm. Maybe they have a TCP failback, but seems unlikely.

Believe it or not, don’t care anymore. Maybe someone else will find the information useful.

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