I’m unable to download a recorded clip from my V3 cam via any means.
What’s the deal? What do I have to do to grab the clip?
Is this clip from SD card or cloud (cam plus)?
To start, try the following
In the Wyze app, go into settings and clear the cache
Click th “reset services” under the cam settings the tap the “reboot”
Close the wyze app
In Android OS, go to the wyze app, and clear cache there
Reboot phone
See if any improvement.
Reboot phone
Thanks for the suggestions. The clip is both on the SD card and in the cloud via Cam Plus. I did all those steps on my phone. The clip is now two days old and no longer appears on the (recent) Events menu in the Wyze app. I can locate and play it from the timeline under the SD menu, but I don’t see an option to download in that view. I can still access the cloud clip via Web View (Cam Plus), but as reported before, there’s no visible Download button.
It’s looking at this point like I’m going to have to pull the SD card, plug it in m PC, and copy the clip directly.
When viewing the SD card there should be a “record” button which you hit at the start and end of where you want to save. It should save a file to your phone. The nice thing about that is it doesn’t add the “captured on wyze” or whatever to the end. I can’t comment on the Cam Plus clip or why it won’t download, as I don’t have a subscription. Is it just that clip or all clips that won’t download? Maybe there is some permission you need to grant the app (access to your gallery, etc)?
Aha - I wasn’t familiar with the SD tab and didn’t pay attention to the Record button; I was looking for a button to Download the predefined clip (which I know I’ve done before). I see now that you have to manually set a start and stop point for this method, which I set just before and after the clip. That worked and saved it to my phone. Thanks much!
I actually didn’t know you could set a start and stop point, I usually just play back the SD card video and tap the record button when I want it to start and stop.
For the absolute highest quality (a relative term due to the high compression these cams use) the files on the SD card will be best, so sometimes if you need a bit more clarity on a face or license plate, it is worth it to pull the card and get the original file. Long ago you could run a custom firmware that let you get the files off the cam via FTP over the network but that’s long gone.
Another strange thing I’ve noticed, if you’re trying to see a license plate or a face or something with detail, what you see on the paused video in the wyze app will be much lower quality than what you get if you tap the “take a picture” button and then view the resulting file. I’ve had totally unreadable license plates on a paused frame become very clear on the saved image.
From what I recall when on a PC and viewing the actual SD card file, pausing yields the better quality image, so it must just be related to how the wyze app streams video to the phone vs how it downloads a single frame. I know even on the PC extracting a still frame works better with some software vs. others. Probably the more professional stuff can see (or determine) the exact start and stop of each frame and just pull the image right out. A matter of synch and timing. Though I feel like that isn’t as prevalent anymore, so probably the tech has filtered down to the “little guys”. I think @habib probably knows more about that than me though.
I realize that you’ve already done a manual record from microSD playback so that you can save the video on your mobile device, but I wonder if you have tried retrieving the cloud event from the Events tab. You should be able to use the calendar control near the top of the screen to select the day of the event and scroll through events on that day to find the one you want to save. You can also filter the view to this single Cam v3 in order to narrow the search and reduce the amount of necessary scrolling.
Once you find that event, you should be able to tap it and then tap the Share or Download button (you may need to tap a blank area of the screen to make the control strip for this visible, and you may also need to tap More to reveal the Download button). As @dave27 alluded, using the Share feature might append a “Captured by…” message to the end of the video, but in my experience with other Cams using the Download feature does not. I don’t have any Cam v3s, so I can’t report personal experience with that model.
Does something like that work, or do you still experience problems when trying to save event videos that way?
It all depends on the quality of the original image/video. If the pixels are not there no professional software will create them out of thin air. However, the movie industry would have us believe the opposite 
Interesting stuff. I don’t need high def for this clip but I’ll have to try a direct SD copy sometime.
To clarify, by set a start and stop point, I meant what you described. I couldn’t grab the predefined clip (apparently only available under Events), so I tapped Record just before the clip was about to slide under the vertical center line and then tapped Stop just past its end. Colored line segments representing the clips show for reference on the timeline, but you’re seeing the whole continuous recording and can start and stop wherever you want.
Thanks for the tip. I had attempted this on the phone app, but my tab says Recent Events, and it doesn’t go back that far. I have to go to the SD menu, where I can go to the day in the calendar but there’s no option to download clips; just manually Record a new one. If by cloud event you mean Web View available with Cam Plus, I tried that too. I can locate the clip there but no action makes a control strip appear. Tried different browsers. As you say, I was able to retrieve what I needed from the phone using Record and Stop.
I think there’s a misunderstanding. I wasn’t referring to the Recent Events section on the main Live Stream screen for the individual Cam’s UI. I’m talking about the Events tab on the bottom of the Home screen. If you try that and refer to my previous post, then I wonder if that allows you to save the events you want.
No, I’m still talking about the Events tab in the app, which is where I believe most users typically review all server-recorded events from multiple Cams when using a Wyze subscription.
Yeah regardless there is compression and that data can’t be recovered. I just have noticed over the years that some things seem to be better at extracting a clear (as possible) still frame than others. Including apparently the Wyze app, as pausing the video results in a much blurrier picture than what it exports when you click the “take picture” button of that same paused video.
I know a long time ago if you wanted to extract a frame from a video, doing it in “professional” editing software resulted in a much better image than the basic free apps. But I think that is mostly a thing of the past. I’m assuming the pro apps can find the time synch and know exactly where the start and end of each frame is, and the free ones probably used to export a frame that was a blur/mix of two frames or something.
Ah ok, wasn’t sure if there was a feature I didn’t know about 
Even the basic windows software (now ClipChamp, previously movie maker) can take the 1 minute file(s) you copy off the SD card and trim the start and end to exactly where you want, and that will typically be the highest quality. However the difference isn’t huge, so usually it is not worth going and pulling the SD card. But if you need several minutes, those programs can also join them into one file for you (and there are ones like MP4 Joiner that can do it in bulk too). So sometimes pulling the card is worth it.
When I do the record from the wyze app sometimes I’ll use my phone’s gallery to trim it a bit more exact, since tapping that button can be hard to get precise. But usually precision isn’t required.
This is a reasonable thing to try as I know several cams have (and have had in the past) issues playing back video from the “recent events” but work fine on the “main events” or vice-versa. I believe that was more with SD card but a similar glitch may be impacting Cam Plus. My OGs still have problems with it off the SD card and at one point my Panv3s did too.
Do mavens get access to the special app icons section of the forum? I can’t even quote them they just show as black boxes for me
Found that Events tab. Didn’t notice it before because I assumed I had to select the specific camera first in Home, and I have more than one. But this didn’t work either. After selecting the date and scrolling down through the clips to the desired time, the queue bottoms out several hours short of where the clip is. Even after selecting a filter that shortened the queue.
While scrolling, when you hit the bottom, you have to “scroll up and hold” to get it to load more.
Yeah, and the way @locutor is describing the problem I wonder if there’s a bug in Cam v3’s UI, so trying a different route seems reasonable.
That’s what I figured and why I thought it seemed worth trying.
Can you provide more detail about what didn’t work? Are you able to use the method I described above to download any event clips? Have you tried that? As @dave27 indicated, you may need to drag up and hold from the bottom in order to expand your list to get to this specific clip—and you should see a circular chasing/loading animated graphic at the bottom when you do that—but I’d like to know if you’re able to download any clips by going this route, because I think that helps to give a more complete picture of the problem you’re describing.
They’re not actually app icons, and I’m not aware of any special Forum section for that.
When I include things like “ Events” in my posts, I’m exploiting the Discourse Icon theme component, which I believe is available to all Forum users, but I haven’t actually seen anyone else in Wyze Forum use it. It’s not a difficult component to use, but it takes a little bit of extra effort and some BBCode-like formatting, so I’m not surprised that I haven’t seen it used more often. I do it because I think adding a graphical element in context can serve as an additional visual cue to users, like in this case maybe it helped @locutor find the tab I was trying to reference. That’s my goal with it, anyway.
Incidentally, I’m also (ab)using the HTML <abbr> tag when I do this, which you can see if you hover your mouse pointer over the icon. I do that as an additional reinforcement of the cue.
The icons themselves are whatever is available in the subset that’s been enabled for this particular platform instance, and I find that these generally correspond to the Font Awesome free set. If I can find a Font Awesome icon that approximates a UI element from the Wyze app, then that’s what I’ll use to enhance a post, but those icons aren’t actually pulled from the app.
I can use some icons from the actual Wyze app because of the way the app has some Web-based elements, so things like this can be inserted from Wyze servers:
Those actually are app icons, and I discovered that I could use those accidentally when I was muckin’ around with adb a while back. Because those are all-black or all-white SVG graphics, though, and because a reader here may or may not be able to see them depending on which Forum Theme someone has elected to use, I’ve put them inside a quote block above to change the background color and help with visibility. That’s one of the things that makes those less useful for posting here.
The Font Awesome free icons are pretty great, though, and it’s possible to change the colors when using those for some things. I think that can be useful.
When I’ve quoted myself in an instance where I’ve used one or more of them, they’ve blown up really big in the quote because they’re SVGs and will just automatically scale up unless otherwise constrained, so in some cases I’ve just deleted them or re-coded them within a quote so that they don’t appear huge. I’ve seen this happen when other people have quoted some of my posts, too. I’m not sure why you’re seeing black boxes or what it is, exactly, that you’re seeing when you do that.
It’s a cool tool to have in the box, I think, and it makes me think of something that @carverofchoice wrote once. I hope that answered the question!
I can’t confirm nor deny the as I never worked with video editing software. When it comes to Photoshop, as I said if the pixels are not there Photoshop will try and interpolate them but that will not magically make the pixels appear. It will just make them appear “better”.
You mean it doesn’t work like the TV shows where the tech guy on CSI makes crystal clear faces appear after a bunch of squares pass across the screen several times?
You know the answer to that question 