Do not trust your Wyze cam v3 for security

My car was broken into last week. My car is within my detection zone. Zero events recorded. Only events I have are of flying bugs. Plus I still can’t get it to record animals when I know there is some kind of animal digging on my lawn. I’ve tried every setting option but the camera picks up nothing. Complete garbage. Time to look into other options

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I have not had that issue, all my cameras are great at detecting events, V3, V3Pro, V4 and even the WCO v1.
I have 128 GB and 256GB SD cards in all the plug in cameras set for continuous recording 24/7. I recommend you install a good quality 128 or 256GB SD card in your
V3 camera and set if for continuous recording.

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We don’t have a lot of details, but there are a lot of things that could be contributing to why you aren’t getting events recorded for different things.

  • Sensitivity levels
  • Object Size
  • Object Distance
  • Lighting conditions
  • Cooldown limitations
  • Many more things.

For example, I would expect that if I have a mole digging holes in my yard at night while I’m using IR or dim ambient lighting, I would not expect my camera to record an event, particularly since there aren’t a sufficient number of pixel changes happening, especially if that hole is a couple of dozen feet away from the camera.

The smaller an object is and the farther away it is, and the less light there is, the less likely we’re going to get an event recording. This is the same for all cameras of every brand [that uses pixel change as motion…PIR or Radar work differently though]. Different brands can fiddle with different settings and range limits though, like allowing motion to trigger based on fewer minimum pixel changes, and other things. These things have side-effects, like getting more people to complain about smaller things like insects causing events. Speaking of insects, they are likely to cause events if we turn on the IR light or spotlight because they are attracted to these things and will fly close to the camera, thus looking bigger to the camera lens because they are so close. So a close insect might trigger an event while a bigger distant animal does not because of the number of pixels each is taking up and changing. It’s not just the size of the animal, but the distance that helps determine how many pixels it uses.

Wyze cameras are optimized to detect an average human roughly 20-30ft from the lens. If a person is farther away or in dim lighting, then the accuracy of the AI Detections go down and are less likely to make an accurate detection. If you have a digging animal that is smaller than that, then they would realistically need to be much closer to be accurately detected.

If we are not using Cam Plus then we have to add to our consideration the cool down limitation. If we have the nightvision on and an insect gets attracted to the IR light and causes an event, but then 3 minutes later is when the animal digs a hole or a person breaks into the car, then the Wyze camera definitely won’t alert to it because it hasn’t been 5 minutes since the insect set it off.

We can use an SD card to mitigate almost all of these issues though. You can get really affordable SD cards now and the SD card can be set to record continuously to not miss ANYTHING. Then, say an animal digs a hole in your yard that the camera can see. You can just scroll back and forth on the timeline. Jump forward until you see the hole, then jump back a few hours until you don’t see the hole, then just forward halfway in between, and do that until you find the exact time the hole arrives. It usually only takes me a few SECONDS to find something like this on an SD card. No big deal to me.

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100% agree. uSD card with the camera set to continuous recording. Problem solved.

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In the past there were problems, people reporting gaps even on sd card recordings.
To start recording camera needs internet connection to log in.
When there is power outage I do not think camera will resume recording

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Even in the event of internet outage, you can technically still find the footage if you physically remove the microSD to play it in a PC or phone. As long as you have power then all the footage is recorded into the microSD regardless if there is internet connection or not.

The main problem is that the camera needs to first establish an internet connection with a NTP server to provide the proper timestamp and record into the correct folders. Afterwards, Wyze’s app relies the recordings being in the correct folder to align the footage chronologically. If it can’t establish an internet connection to a NTP server, then it will start recording into a random folder with a random timestamp. Your only choice will be then to physically remove the micro SD and view the footage in a PC or phone.

I don’t believe that’s correct. It’s not just a NTP server that the camera needs. When the camera powers up, it’s a brick. About the only thing it knows is the WiFi to connect to. Everything else it gets from the initial contact with Wyze.

I will double check that later today. On the 4th of July, I set up three of my Wyze cameras in an around the firing pits for the professional fireworks show I shot that day. The intent was to set up a Cradlepoint access point with the correct SSID and password and a cellular internet connection so the cameras could make that connection. However we ran out of time and that did not happen. So the cameras were powered for about an hour without ever getting a WiFi connection. They had previously been set to continuous recording. I will pull the uSD cards and see what is there.

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It’s changed. I pulled the uSD card from all three cameras that I had looking at the firing pits, and sure enough, they all had recordings of our fireworks show. The date and times were wrong and reflected the last time that the cameras were on the network, but they recorded.

The recording below (provided it uploads right) is taken from a Pan V3 that is as close as five feet from the firing pits for the finale and pointed straight up. The finale starts about 20 seconds into the recording.

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Yeah this mirror my findings as well when I was testing 4.36.12.9751 V3 beta firmware couple months ago. I set one of my V3 camera to connect a brand new SSID (guest network for my convenience) and I started enabling/disabling the guest network and power cycling to see if it will still record. That’s also how I found out about the 30min internet outage issue (aka OG camera behavior) even without power cycling on the V3 beta firmware 4.36.12.9751.

In my opinion, it is imperative to have micro SD recording set at continuous recording in the event of an internet outage (and power surge) then at least you will still have emergency footage when you physically remove the micro SD to view it.

what “everything else” ?

for local recording it only needs wifi password and time.
so if they fixed gaps, they should also fix time, camera should get time from router when there is no internet. most routers work as ntp servers

Customer should not be required to use uSD card to “improve” wyze camera If customer has already paid for cloud subscription.

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The problem is that Cloud recording does no always capture the complete event no matter what the advertising says. I have many Cloud video events that are of long duration but I have many more that are not even though the motion was still in progress. I also want to see what happened before and after the event.

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Yup.

It happens to OG cam and V3 cam.
I’m very close to cancel the paid subscription.

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Nope. Most consumer grade routers will function as a DNS and DHCP server, but not as a NTP server. I would not be surprised to find ones that do, but I have never seen one. Higher end routers often do (mine has that capability, but I do not use it). And if you see how crappy most router clocks are, you would not want it to be your time server.

Both CamPlus and a local uSD card have advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage of a local recording is that you are not dependent on a working Internet connection. Without that local recording you can’t really call it a security camera. The biggest advantages of the cloud operation is off site storage an the AI processing.

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yes you did not see one

It’s those newer cameras that have the biggest issues my og camera never has a problem but the other two just wow., all you have to do is comb through your sd card it’ll be on there… unless you failed to use an SD card… I also understand issues with wyze

Wyze products are toys, they can’t be relied upon for anything

Maybe in your case it was operator error? Do you own any WYZE cams?
I’ve had my own issues with WYZE but all 12 of my cameras are still working doing both cloud recording and continuous recording. My old Battery powered WCO v1 cams that were installed 4 Nov 2020 still work and capture video events everyday.
I’ve had no bad issues with any of the plug in cameras except one V3 and that issue was fixed.I have six V3, one V3 PRO , four WCO and one V4 cam.
So what is your issue with the cams?

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