Hi! I have 4 cameras. Could someone please tell me approximately how much data a single camera will use a month in SD and HD? My cable company charges quite a bit for overages.
Thanks.
Per the FAQ page:
How much data does the WyzeCam use?
The WyzeCam’s live stream video feature uses 1-2MB per minute in SD video or 4-7MB per minute in HD video
The above is only while you’re streaming. To know how much you use in a month, you’d have to say how many minutes or hours a day you are streaming video from the camera.
Isn’t the camera always streaming to the Wyze servers?
Isn’t the camera always streaming to the Wyze servers?
Nope… only 12 sec clips are sent to Amazon’s servers. So, to answer the OP’s question, if you have a ton of alerts, each clip is around a few K… so, it highly depends on that.
If you have NO alerts, but are doing continuous recording, then you will have 0 bandwidth used by the ISP.
- If you are on a wifi zone (home, business), it it using data?
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Thank you Shadowcam.
So the motion detection must be done on device? I just assumed it was done server side.
I’m pretty sure ALL motion detection is done server-side. If it was done on the cam, it could be self contained when an SD card is installed but it’s not. It needs cloud connectivity 24/7 (and that’s why they seem to spontaneously change their MAC address if you block them from the 'Net via MAC filtering…)
My calculations show it could use as much as 10G/day per camera with HD turned on. That’s 300G/month per camera so if you have a 1TB cable Internet limit, you’d exceed that with 3 cams and streaming video…
Please please correct me if I am incorrect. (Wyze?)
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Ya’ll are making this clear as mud. I think the OP needs to understand what goes to cloud storage vs local storage (SD) card. Motion activated events go to cloud in 12 second increments with a 5 minute delay between recordings. If you have an SD card in the cam all motion activated events continually are recorded to SD card in one minute segments with no delay in between. So the only bandwidth that is used are the 12 second cloud recordings and this has to be insignificant.
Edit- You also use bandwidth if you are using the LiveView function on the app. Sorry, I forgot this one.
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If this was true, now on earth does the cloud servers figure out that there is motion unless ALL video is sent up to them ALL the time? The camera and app do not (as far as I know) detect any motion. It’s all cloud based and that’s why you need a 24/7 connection to the 'Net.
The SD card allows you to have local copy of continuous recorded material and it also stores the 12s clips instead of using the cloud storage space.
I wish Wyze would provide a definitive answer on this, but think they are afraid of confirming how much data these cams actually use…
You have it all wrong my friend. The cam only uploads to the cloud the 12 second video but keeps on recording to the SD card as long as there is motion to keep the recording feature going. If after 5 minutes the next time there is motion it once again uploads another 12 second capture.
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This is exactly how I understand the process.
You have to have the network/AWS connection to play back the recorded or live video and to receive notifications when motion is detected.
They don’t send any of the data to the web unless you are live streaming, playing back from an SD card, or receiving a motion alert. So, even though you are watching a clip stored on the SD card, it is playing from the SD card, through Amazon Web Services. It is only stored permanently on the SD card. The motion alerts (12 seconds) is stored on AWS.
I just got a rude awaking about the need to properly configure these cameras (reached my 1TB data limit with Comcast). I installed five cameras, enabling local continuous recording (SD) to the installed card. All cameras are set to standard definition, local continuous recording, with motion alerts. I left motion alerts on (no notification) as “time stamps” so that I knew what parts of the recorded video to view if necessary. Net is, I went from an average of 300mb per month to over 1TB, in one month. I’ve now turned off all motion detection and I guess I will just go back and review all of the saved video if/when something happens that requires me to review. Somewhat time consuming. It would be nice if you could have an option for motion detection alerts saved to the card only so that all video is kept local. I understand that remote viewing of the playback (outside of my home network) would consume Comcast data.
Does anyone know if reviewing playback, while on your home network, consumes my internet bandwidth? Assuming it doesn’t because I’m on the home network, but perhaps it routes through AWS? That would be a bummer.
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Let’s do some math. Streaming video is somewhere in the 50 to 150 K Bytes per second (it depends A LOT on what’s going on), so if we use a figure of 1 MegaByte for each 12 second clip, it’s likely a decent figure to use for a wild guess and it makes the math easy. Assuming a camera creates an alert every 5 minutes all day (very unlikely), that would be 288 alerts so using our approximate number of 1 MB per clip, that’s 288 MegaBytes per day per camera. With Rick’s five cameras in that worst case scenario, that is 1.44 GigaBytes per day which comes out to about 45 GB per month. It would be incredibly unusual for that worst case scenario to happen. HOWEVER, if you start streaming just one camera, you are getting that one MegaByte every 12 seconds of streaming, or about five MegaBytes per minute, or 300 MB per hour, or 7.2 GigaBytes per day.
So, I would assume that if Rick used over 1TB of data in a month, there was A LOT of streaming involved. The 12 second alerts was a small part of it.
For a “real World” comparison, my WiFi can tell me how much data each client uses for various time periods. At this time, there are six Wyze cameras powered up at my house. They vary from cameras that give me so many alerts that it’s annoying to one that has NEVER triggered an alert, but I tend to look at it for a few seconds per day (it’s looking at a rat trap in the attic). On average, I spend something on the order of 15 minutes per day (wild ass guess figure) looking at various cameras. For the past 7 days, my WiFi shows that the six cameras uploaded a total of 2.3 GB of data with a low of 64.6 MB and a high of 1.3 GB.
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@rick – I have two camera’s and my usage went sky high with just two. No continuous recording, very few alerts and very few viewing of camera’s stream. Not sure if it’s something on my end, but I have not had the time, knowledge or tools to dig in deeper. They are sitting on the shelf until further notice. My co-worker had a similar experience and decided to just pay for unlimited data from Comcast. I’m not willing to fork over $600 per year for that. If you (or anyone else) ever figure out what’s going on, please let me know!
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I hate to dig up an old thread but something isn’t adding up right… I monitor use by IP/Mac address and I have one wyze cam v2 that just used 230gb of data in 11 days… yes, 20+ gb per day. I have 4 cameras and only one of them has done this. I can clearly see the data is going to Amazon (AWS). Also the intriguing part is there are NO notifications for these days… I am moments away from turning them all off and buying a different product. I did enter a support ticket.
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@UserCustomerGwen… might need a tech response here
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Thanks for reporting this! We’re sorry to hear about this trouble and understand your concern. May I please have your support ticket number? Also, I’m going to send this over to our tech side so that they can take a look.
@Loki, thanks for tagging me in! 
Here ya go 135211 . If you need any info please feel free to reach out.
What are you using to monitor the bandwidth, since that hat shouldn’t be possible for the clips.
Each clip is 12 secs, and it is around 1.4MB big on average. You can have around 12 clips per hour if it goes off every 5 mins. That means 1.4MB * 12 would be 16.8MB a hour, and if it does that for 24 hours, that is 403.2MB per day or 2.8GB a week… or 12GB a month.
If you are looking at a live feed 24/7, that is a different story.
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