I’ve run into critital notification delays since upgrading one of my locations from Cam Lite (on V3 cameras) to Cam Plus (on a mix of V3s and new V4s).
Previously, with Cam Lite, recordings were limited to 12 seconds. While short, I consistently received fast and reliable notifications when activity was detected.
Now, with Cam Plus, the recording duration seems unlimited. This became a major problem when a person spent 4.5 minutes breaking into the building. I didn’t receive any notification, including an AI Descriptive Alert, until approximately 12 minutes after the person was initially detected.
I believe the delay is due to the camera recording the entire long event. This likely leads to:
Longer upload times for the extended video clips.
Increased processing time for AI analysis of the larger files.
My priority is to be notified immediately when someone arrives, not several minutes later. Is there a way to retain the benefits of Cam Plus (especially for my new V4 cameras) while limiting the recording length to ensure prompt notifications? I’m guessing the same issue would happen everywhere I sub to CamPlus, I’ve just been lucky not to have an issue with someone spending any time tresspassing or worse until now to know how the recording/alerts would work.
I have learned a lot from this forum – Any advice or solutions would be greatly appreciated!
Funny that you seem to forget that Cam Lite has 5-minute cooldown. What if someone throws a stone, breaking a window. Wait about 10 seconds and then break in. You have 5-minutes to unplug all the cameras. All you get is a clip of a broken window.
My best guess is that your cams are now uploading much more data (no cooldown, every little bit of motion now has to upload to the cloud and do an AI analysis). Cam Lite also uses much more simplified AI.
From what I’ve seen here, the AI analysis on their server should not take long, so I’d focus on your wifi signal quality and your internet upload speed, I suspect one of them may be causing stuff to get backlogged. Using detection zones and reducing sensitivity can reduce the number of events that have to get uploaded and may help ease the issue, but realistically improving your signal or upload speed is going to be the biggest “win”.
Do you have “other motion” enabled? I’m curious if those alerts will come through faster than the AI ones, but I sort of suspect that it may first do the AI analysis, then if it doesn’t match anything, send it through as “other”, so probably won’t help.
Note that as far as I’ve seen from people’s reports here, it does not upload the entire clip to do the analysis, just a single still frame from the start of the event. However it uploads the clip for cloud viewing directly after that, so uploading the more frequent (and potentially longer) clips is probably part of what is putting a strain on your bandwidth, which then could in turn be delaying the alert coming back to tell you there was motion.
EDIT - The above is true with standard AI. But if you have the Pro subscription with descriptive AI, I believe that does analyze the entire clip (or at least many frames pulled from it), since it describes what happens throughout the video.
Is there any documentation to support that? Given that it has been priced similarly to the other cheap cameras (vs the v3 Pro that is double the price or more) it seems unlikely, but suppose it is possible. When they initially advertised the v4 it had onboard person detection as an “included” feature but when people started to complain they revised that spec. Probably a copy and paste error from the v3 Pro.
Thanks for your helpful response. I don’t think I have any connectivity issues but will double check; the site had 12 v3s before and they worked reliably
The issue seems to be that the way Cam Plus premium w/ AI Descriptive alerts work, which I think you and I agree on results in longer clips being analyzed which in turn results in delays.
I’d like to be able to limit the time of clips on plug-in cams like I can on battery units so I can get faster alerts. Anyone have any ideas? I’m wondering if “upload a short clip to the cloud” automation would get me those faster alerts.
Nah that’s totally separate, it wouldn’t get AI analysis etc (unless there is some sort of glitch with it where it happens to limit the time on the AI upload too, I guess you could try it, but I don’t think it will help, maybe even hurt).
I don’t have the AI so I can’t comment on my experience but others here haven’t complained about long delays like that. Which leads me to believe it is connectivity related. If several cams are trying to upload a long clip at the same time maybe it is just a lot more load on your network or internet than before when you just had short clips (or even just images) being uploaded. With standard (non AI) and even the basic AI alerts, all it has to do is send a still frame which is much easier on the wifi and upload bandwidth.
Not a solution, but an option. Use some motion sensors for immediate notifications and let the cameras do their thing. It wouldn’t give you person, but it would give you an alert to check the camera feed.
Yes, but then your cameras won’t record using CamPlus and the clips are only 12 seconds long.
I am going to second @dave27 's comment about connectivity issue. I was in a similar boat not too long ago. I had a measly 1Mbps upload speed and when I upgraded to Cam Plus Unlimited my four cameras could not keep up with the upload of hundreds of motion events so the cameras would constantly disconnect as well as fail to send notifications. Once moving on to higher upload speed and reverting to Cam Lite the issues disappeared altogether.
You might check your router configuration settings. In my older Linksys I have 2 of my Wyze v3 cameras with the greatest distance from my Linksys set to Priority.
Thanks all, although my network is not the newest, I have been monitoring the router’s htop and it isn’t getting maxxed out; I have fiber connection with sweet up & down at this site, so I guess the issue is wired cameras don’t have a way to set a maximum recording time?
Interesting, In my case the notifications were quicker when I was on Cam Unlimited and now that I went back to Cam Lite I find them coming few minutes late. Mind you I did not have descriptive alerts, so maybe that is the reason. Who knows!
I will downgrade next month - I like the AI alerts, but it seems I may have jumped in a little early as it has failed to deliver some Person alerts I would have liked to see, so it may not be a good fit for my needs. Thanks for the help @habib
