Had two v2s outside for a year with no after market covers. One under/inside of the garage door frame area with very limited eave/sun coverage and another sitting on top of a metal outdoor outlet (the outlet was an add on so the box for it sticks out from the brick wall, not a flush outlet). This camera has a lot of eave coverage but is exposed to the direct sunlight for several hours in the morning. Both cameras still working fine. Biggest complaint is the false positives even with all of the updates and the person detection feature including the most recent xx.169 release. I have a lot of mature trees that love to mimic human movement from their shadows especially on windy days. However, I can tell that the AI model from XNOR is getting better with time.
I read somewhere on these forums that the new outdoor cam will have a PIR sensor…my only concern is how far/powerful will it be especially in Texas during the extreme heat/summer season because PIR sensors can become less sensitive/accurate the more the ambient temperature increases. The XNOR AI might ultimately rule for detecting people in my case.
This is for another thread but still would like a toggle to stop the camera from RECORDING regular motion events as that activates the cool down period and ends up making the camera potentially miss recording a person…missed a few package deliveries because of this…very annoying.
Jeff007
I agree.
The person detection is great ONLY if there is no other motion of any kind before a person walks by. I’d say that I miss about 40 to 50% of person detection because the camera is picking up a leaf falling, a shadow from passing clouds, rain, bugs, etc etc. So it would be great if there was a way to disable the camera from detecting any motion but person motion. Unless they shorten the cool down period to something more reasonable like 15 to 30 seconds, then person AI is almost of no use.
With all the false notifications, it makes my camera’s less effective. Even the one I have in my home facing our living room, suffers from many of the same problems.
I agree too that the AI part has less usefulness with the limitation of not being able to disable regular motion event recording. I think Wyze’s original objective when they first launched these camera devices was to put a device out on the market with superior value and awesome functionality so that nearly everyone could have access to such technology and where for some people was previously not financially possible. Wyze indeed delivered marvelously here!
The functionality part may have been, at the time, more set on basic things instead of the extended features such as person detection. At the time of initial release competitors were starting to develop or roll out similar extended features but unfortunately were charging for them. I like how Wyze disrupted that part of the industry and made basic person detection free and on existing devices! Never thought they would pull that off but they did to my surprise.
The theme for my post…hurry up Wyze and release the outdoor camera…we are getting almost up to 1000 posts on this thread. PLEASE.
That’s interesting. I’m actually really curious to see what tree shadows it’s flagging as human movement. I’ve never had that happen with shadows.
Yeah. I know they’re aware that customers want this. I’ve seen Wyze employees acknowledge it. I assume they’re working on it. I doubt they’ll shorten the cooldown period (unless they offer a paid storage option in the future) but I think they might make a separate 5-minute cooldown period for person detection or something.
I agree. In my case, it’s often not super useful for much except capturing me when I walk out the front door. Usually, if someone walks by it, it already captured a motion event 30 seconds earlier, when their car drove up.
On the cool down issue. I realize there is a storage cost issue, but why couldn’t they just shorten the number of days that they will provide backup for free to 1 week or even just 5 days. This cuts their storage in half or more. If there was something of value to keep, I would have captured it to my PC right away and not wait two weeks. So I don’t need Wyze to be my long term storage site. Besides, I also have the SD card which is saving these events till it gets overwritten by newer detection.
Between the two options, I have more than enough ways to save what I need. The rest is just unnecessary videos of bugs and shadows that Wyze is paying to store.
Shorting the storage to 5 to 7 days could allow for a much shorter cool down time which is far more important in capturing important events.
How are you capturing to your PC?
I do with TinyCam on a Shield but find it unreliable.
One week may not be enough for people on vacation. Most times you can still view and record to your phone when you’re away though.
Just because someone goes out of town on vacation is no excuse for making Wyze be your long term storage solution. If it is important to save, then find a way to save to your phone, tablet or laptop. And don’t forget about the cameras SD card solution. There are many options and ways to do this. If it’s important then one must take the initiative and not try to pass it off to Wyze.
The internet is a wondrous thing. Finding what you want is just a click away. That’s how I found out about BlueStacks, which by the way is FREE.
No one is making Wyze do anything. It’s the service they offered for sale and we bought when getting the cameras. They could easily give us the option of recording to our own offsite storage but chose to supply limited storage instead.
You and I, and a few others, have come up with ways to expand on the services Wyze offered but the majority of customers will not. I suspect the majority of users use the cameras as a remote viewer and don’t care about recording at all.
I do use MEmu android emulator. TinyCam is more automated but can be unreliable. I have TinyCam sending clips to Google drive, my home FTP server (NAS) and to it’s own storage but sometimes it will go a day without recording anything.
I didn’t express myself well. I realize that Wyze gave us the two week storage as a feature of the camera. It was/is a marketing tool to gain customers over other options, but now I think that Wyze owners need to take more responsibility to save video that they deem important.
Wyze could save a lot of storage cost and provide a much shorter cool down period. I believe this is a win win for us and Wyze. You said…“the majority of customers will not.” That’s the point I am making. If the majority of users are unwilling to be more proactive then I see Wyze stuck trying to appease the masses. I realize it may be hard to take away something that Wyze gave us, but in the long run, if we can offset the shorter storage with shorter cool down times, it makes the Wyze camera that much better and a more attractive option.
The balancing act is to give the customer storage but also give shorter cool down times. I guess they thought 2 weeks storage was more important than cool down times. As many of us have stated, Cool down is a very important element.
I hope they are listening.
By the way, I did try Tiny Camera but found it not reliable at all. BlueStacks has worked extremely well, at least for me.
I’m afraid it would be seen as bait and switch. I think a lot of people would see the storage time cut in half and not see the benefit of the shorter cool down time.
I am in agreement with you, I would rather have less time and shorter cool down.
I would like to see others opinion on this.
This conversation has probably reached a point where it should be in it’s own thread.
Flag it to a moderator if you agree.
Wyze might be able to program a few options within the App to give trade-offs between cool down, storage, and length of recording (time). Now that they have been doing it for a while, they probably have some statistics that they could analyze to allow more custom options that wouldn’t break their bank.
My thoughts as well - why not give us a few options - just some thinking out loud here:
add a slider to select wait time after initial motion before recording, and like you say - set recording time and cooldown (within certain constraints) with resultant storage time - plus I don’t see any difference in the storage time based on resolution - wouldn’t SD offer more than HD? SD has been fine for my needs so far, although I do prefer HD for nighttime (another option maybe). For adjustments, I could see setting something like a 4-6 second recording delay when triggered by motion and then maybe a 10-20 second recording time - for what I see of those delivery types where the truck triggers the motion recording but the person walking to the door is missed during the cooldown, this might eliminate needing to set a shorter cool down. Or if tree shadows trigger motion then maybe the delay would eliminate any recording of these false positives. Maybe use the person detection (well, only if it were more reliable) to override the cooldown - ie: it sees motion so goes for 12 seconds, but then sees a person so skips the cooldown for the following 12 sec. Basically its a matter of programming ability to offer the options and make the constraints both workable and useful. Just tossing out some thoughts…
angus.black
Your suggestion to move this conversation is good, however, I have seen numerous other threads talking about cool down times, delayed motion detection by 1, 2 or 3 seconds to alleviate all the false shadow/bug/leaf/rain/etc detection as well as the short 12 second recording time. So I’m not sure another thread is needed. Certainly Wyze is fully aware of all of these issues by now.
Per @angus.black’s request, I’ve split this discussion into its own topic. (Not so much because it’s not covered elsewhere, but because it had diverged from the subject of the new outdoor camera.)
