I’m looking to find a way, if possible to have the camera (v3 and v4) reecord continuously to an SD card but store the files as a single mp4, instead of 1 min videos. I’m looking record animal behavior over a 24 hour period, and putting that many 1 min videos together is not feasible, and I have not found the setting that does this.
Any suggestions?
Welcome to the Forum, @pils.tcn! 
I’m unaware of any way to to force the camera to write a single video file that’s 24 hours in length. I recall reading elsewhere on the Forum a suggestion that Wyze has chosen the scheme of discrete 1-minute video files because that’s a way to minimize data/footage loss if there’s some kind of interruption (Wi-Fi or power, for instance): If something happens while the camera is recording and it’s writing to removable storage in 1-minute chunks when there’s a power failure, then you lose much less footage than if the camera was doing writes every five minutes, for instance. I suppose someone might ask why the camera isn’t just doing continuous writes to the card (so there would be even less of a loss potential), but one potential counter-argument probably has to do with the finite number of write cycles a microSD card is expected to endure in its lifetime.
There’s always some kind of compromise involved. What you seem to want as a feature native to the cameras and app would likely require major rewrites to the relevant firmwares and software. I imagine it’s unlikely that this is on Wyze’s roadmap, especially given the recent release of an entirely new app version.
Having said that, I wonder why you say that concatenating multiple 1-minute video files together “is not feasible”, because it’s actually a fairly trivial exercise for a PC. Of course, that involves physically pulling the microSD card from a given camera and plugging that into a PC for file manipulation (because Wyze doesn’t provide a facility for directly accessing those files even over one’s home LAN), and that can be one impediment if the cameras are positioned in areas or ways that aren’t easy to access. I don’t know your particular circumstances or use case, though. 
As far as I know, there isn’t one.[1] It is possible to record a longer (than one minute) video to your phone, but that involves…
Record icon in the ribbon.
Stop icon.This saves a video file to your phone (of whatever length you chose to record) but requires that the app be kept open and is all done in real-time, so trying to capture 24 hours of continuous footage in that way is absolutely not feasible.
My suggestion would be to pull the microSD card and use an automated process on a PC to join the videos together into the desired length. Since that method allows you to access the files directly, it also gives you a lot more flexibility with manipulation of the video. One of the Forum Mavens created a Web-based applications that can join videos from Wyze cameras but reports that it’s limited to videos ~4.5 hours in length. Other Forum members have suggested other online tools, but I think doing the work locally on a PC makes the most sense—again, this is for the kinds of things I’ve done, and I don’t really know what your ultimate goal or use case is—and other Forum topics outline different tools and ways to do that.
Something else to think about: Since you indicated that you’re looking for a way to create a single large video file on the microSD card, you’d still need a way to access that file, and I’m unaware of any way to do that with a Wyze camera short of physically removing the card and accessing it with another device, like a PC. Other Forum members might chime in and suggest things like setting up a TinyCam server and sending that video feed elsewhere (essentially rolling your own NVR), and it’s possible that could provide a solution for you, but I don’t have any personal experience with that route.
Incidentally, I see that you tagged your topic with cam-pan-v3 but referenced cam-v3 and cam-v4 in your post. That likely isn’t an issue for getting your post the visibility you want in this case, but it’s something to be aware of in the future if you want to target community members with knowledge of and expertise with specific devices or platforms.
I haven’t yet used the new v3.0 app, so I can’t speak directly to that, but my educated guess is that it doesn’t offer any new feature in this regard. ↩︎
I might be wrong, but I think VLC can stitch the files into one MPEG 4 file.
I think it’s supposed to be able to do that, but I haven’t been successful in using that when I’ve tried. I’m not sure if that’s because of the particular codecs Wyze is using for audio and video to package into the MP4s their cameras generate or if it’s something else. I’ve had better results with FFmpeg.
That still requires concatenating multiple files (a fairly easy batch operation for a PC), which @pils.tcn indicates isn’t feasible, but it’s the most straightforward way to do it in my experience, provided that the cameras themselves are easily accessible.
Check out MP4 Joiner. It is free, open source software for Windows, Mac and Linux. It can join multiple MP4 files into one without re-encoding or quality loss.
Probably the wrong tool for the job. You need something that would allow you to feed the video to storage which could be done with a V3 and the wyze_mini_hack firmware ( [GitHub - gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks: wz camera mods... make your camera better.) or some other camera with RTSP or ONVIF.
I had that thought, too. Depending on the need for the end product (is it really necessary to have a single multi-hour video?) and the expected use of that product, there are ways to accomplish it with Wyze devices and some additional work on the user’s part, but other equipment might be better suited to this. It really depends on the details of the specific use case, which I think we don’t have.
Thanks for the response. I went with WYZE cameras for a couple reasons, but primarily because of this paper. It meets all the criteria I need, in particular, being affordable. I realize I can stitch them together, which is what I may ultimately have to do, But, it is interesting that in the paper they record for 10 days continuously, but never mention having to stitch 14,400 one minute videos together. So, I was hoping there was some easy way to do this. But, from the responses and all the research is sounds like stitching is the only method.
Aloha @Crease - thanks for the extensive response. Very helpful. Your’e right, I have two cam-v4 and two cam-pan-v3. We are testing each of these to see what will work best. I went with these cameras because of this paper.
We’re looking to use these to video snail feeding behaviors over a 12-24 hour period, then having students watch the videos and characterize the activities for analysis.
I’m not sure how feasible it will be to stitch together 1400 one minute videos, but if that is what is necessary, then we’ll give that a try. Otherwise, I might start exploring other cameras.
Thanks again for all the input.
I feel really sorry for the students having to sit and watch 12-24 hour long video 
Yeah, it sucks, but it’s the job. We’re hoping we can use a sped up versions. But, if you look at the paper linked, then you’ll see they had to watch 10 days worth of videos. UGH. We’re hoping that at some point, AI will be able to help with this.
Until then, you just have to embrace the suck!
I was just joking, I hope you know that!
Of course. It’s a joke we always make too. It was one of the first things mentioned when we set up these experiments. One of the researchers asked, “Who’s going to watch all those videos?”, and we all said “student interns” in unison. It will give them great stories to tell when they get older and their students or kids complain about what they have to do in school.
I didn’t read the entire thing, but I read some and skimmed other parts, and that looks like an interesting paper. I can see why you’d make the choices you did after reading something like this:
We found that the home security camera Wyze v3 is on par or superior to other professional systems regarding image and video quality, detection methods, field of view and motion detection video length while being 3-18 times less expensive.
I also noticed statements like this:
In lab vivaria, velcro was used to fix cameras above the desired focal subject, allowing for easy removal of the camera to switch SD cards.
So the authors understood that they’d need to be able to retrieve the microSD cards frequently, but they didn’t go into any detail (at least not that I gathered from my brief review) about the video file processing they did once they swapped the cards. That would definitely be important to know, and I can see why you came to the Forum with the original questions based on that information.
If you’re doing a lab setup like what the paper seems to discuss, then I imagine you’ll have easy physical access to the cameras (and their microSD cards), so pulling/swapping those shouldn’t be a problem. If you can pop the microSD card into a PC to access the files and develop a process that meets your needs, then generating the desired longer video files should also be relatively straightforward. There are several topics on the Forum that discuss ways to do this:
I have on my to-do list an idea to try to compile some of this knowledge (and add some of my own) into a Tips & Tricks post for future reference to simplify the sorting and video concatenation process with scripts and FFmpeg for Linux and Windows (I don’t have any macOS devices, but I believe that shell scripts and terminal commands that work in Linux should generally also work in macOS), but I haven’t made that a high priority.
I don’t know what your preferred computing platform is, but one caveat if you’re using Windows is that the regular directory sorting parameters (when you’re generating a list of files for FFmpeg to use for its concatenation operation, for instance) may not produce a correctly sorted output file for FFmpeg to consume, which is why I suggested an alternative command in one post. That may or may not be relevant to your purposes, and in that case I was trying to sort multiple days’ worth of 1-minute files into the correct order, but it’s something to be aware of.
Fortunately, there are freely-available (as in free software) cross-platform tools like FFmpeg and VLC (and many others, I’m sure; I’m just referring to what I’ve used) that you can incorporate into your process and speed up the videos to make the review faster.
This really seems like an interesting use case for Wyze cameras, and it makes me wonder how much people like @WyzeVeronica (who I believe is in marketing) and other Wyze Team members are aware of the use of their products in such projects. I also wonder if there’s any kind of outreach they do or consideration they give for academic use.
Hopefully at some point you can give us an update about how things are working out!
Like having to walk for miles to school through rain, slit and snow uphill both ways
Thank you for tagging me.
This is such a fun read @pils.tcn!
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