This weekend my neighbor told me his truck was broken into. As it turns out one of my cameras points the direction of his truck so I figured I would check out the footage to see if it caught anything. I have it set to continuous record, so I was pretty sure it would have captured it, I just didn’t know what time it happened so I started scrubbing the video to see if I could find it. Here are a couple things I noticed…
Scrubbing video using the mobile app is basically useless. IMO it's far too sensitive and when you try to move the play head it jumps around minutes at a time making it hard to stop somewhere precise in the video. I end up scrubbing back past the event and just letting it play up to where I actually wanted to see. In addition to that, the latency between the reading of the SD and the transfer of the video to the mobile app over the network just adds to the uselessness of the whole experience.
After scrubbing around a bit, the playback will ultimately freakout and send you back to the end of the video (or real-time) making you lose your place in the video and require you to re-scrub back to where you were.
When you do find the point in the video you want, there is no way to download the clip. It allows you to take a picture, but that seems like it's usefulness would be limited. For example, what if I needed to provide a clip (not an image) to the police?
With all that said, I figured I would just pull the SD card, load it up in the computer and use a program like Quicktime (or whatever) that would allow me to properly scrub the video to find what I was looking for in short order. When I did that I was surprised to find an empty SD card. Even though the camera has been in continuous record mode for weeks now, and at this point has started to record over the oldest footage, when looking at it on the computer there wasn't a single video file on the SD card. I checked both from a Mac and a Windows machine with the same results. To make the situation worse, when I installed the SD card back into the camera now all the footage I had previously been able to scrub through was gone!
During playback, use a pinch-out gesture on the timeline to expand it (there are two stages) which gives you much greater control over the timeline when trying to get to a certain point. The only way get the video off the camera in playback is to hit the record button and let it record in real time. (I’m not sure, but that feature may only be in the beta app still.)
I don’t know where your video files may have gone. Did you power down the camera before removing the card? If not, that potentially may have corrupted the card.
This is what I do since there is no “safely remove” option.
I select the camera, then turn off recording to SD card. Then wait for a minute (not sure it this is needed, but the camera seems to like to record 61 second videos, with a little overlap). so I wait just in case it is still trying to write. Then I power off and remove the card. I know, it’s belt and suspenders, but I haven’t had any problems using that procedure, but have only done it a few times, so it’s statistically insignificant anecdotal evidence.
The down side to this, is that you have to remember to turn it back on when you reinsert the card.
I think a “safely remove SD card” that would pause the recording, sync the card, and then indicate it was safe to remove the SD card would be useful. And it would also be nice if there was a way to “remount” the card, so if someone accidentally selected a camera that was 1500 miles away, and “ejected” the SD, they wouldn’t be stuck with an SD that was not recognized until it was popped out and reinserted, or the power was cycled.
No guarantees, but if you ever have a card that appears like it was reformatted and it had important data on it, you may be able to clone it (using something like Win32DiskImager and then attempt to recover files from the copy using something like Recuva or PhotoRec. First rule of data recovery: Don’t write anything to the device you are trying to recover files from. Make an image (block for block) copy to another device and recover from the copy.
I just figured out how to download a section of Playback video. In Playback get to where you want to start. When it is playing, select “Record”. When you get to where you wish to stop select “Stop”. It will put a video clip in your album. Go to your album. Open the video & select “Share”. You can e-mail it to yourself.
That would be the most common use case - grabbing the clip around an activity - so that’s a pretty good workaround.
It would still be nice to be able to download the entire thing, to say, google drive, so that we can do our own thing to it without having to be physically at the camera.
For example, I might like to put it in my video editor (Camtasia), speed it up dramatically, and look for activity that way.
(One day WyzeCam will mark the video where the alerts took place for us - THAT would be nice!!)
Hi, you can assign a new drive letter to your corripted SD card or reinstall the driver:
Go to and right click on My Computer/ This PC. Click the Manage option.
Click the Device Manager option on the left side.
Double-Click Disk Drives option from the list. Then Right Click on the name of your removable drive.
Click Uninstall and click Ok.
Disconnect your storage media and restart your PC.
You can try to format it again, but remember to make a backup, or download the Bitwar Data Recovery to ensure not loss data.
Reconnect your SD card again. Your PC will detect it.
I would restore lost data from the card with a data recovery app. this is the first thing to do to rule out a bad card. you can turn to free data recovery tools like Recuva, TestDisk and PhotoRec, or paid tools like DiskDrill, Stellar Data Recovery, Data Recovery Wizard, RecoverIt, iBoysoft Data Recovery. The list could be quite long if you search in Google.
then you can reformat the card in exFAT format in the computer with quick format option turned off so that the card is verified.