Issue with TinyCam pro

Cameras
22

Still no difference. I am posting my experiences so if a solution is found, perhaps this will assist someone else having similar issues.

I picked 4 cameras, not WOC because those talk to a base station, which introduces another network.

So far, these 4 cameras remain visible on the Wyze app when they have dropped out of TCP. That tells me the feed is coming from the cameras consistently, so I can safely assume the camera, the WiFi connection from the cameras to my router, and the WiFi connection from my router to my iPad are all good.

I turned off the firewall in the router which did not help.

Checked each cam’s IP and MAC in the Wyze app and set DHCP reservation in my router to that IP and MAC. Rebooted the router, rebooted the cams, closed the Wyze app and reopened it to verify the IP and MAC addresses were saved in the Wyze app and the router. I know nothing else to check in the app or router.

Going into TCP, I made sure these 4 cams had the correct channel number, MAC address, and IP according to the list in Camera Status.

Monitoring the camera status page yielded something interesting. Picking one camera, I monitored the IP in TCP on another tablet right next to it. When the feed was active, the camera IP matched, but when the feed was up and down, the camera IP switched to something like 17x.xxxx.xxx.xxx. It flashed so fast I couldn’t read it all. Also, when it switched IP, the relay type went to relay. When the feed is active, it is usually not relay.
Next step is to flash two of the v3 cameras with RTSP firmware unless there is something else to try. My concern is once they are flashed with RTSP, any updates from Wyze will not be applied.

Edit. v3 does not accept RTSP so that diagnostic avenue is closed. And once a cam is flashed with RTSP firmware, is is locked from any feature updates. Security updates will still be applied.

23

When one of the cameras is offline, the IP is not 192.168.0.181 but rather it is 172.107.228.54

My limited knowledge on whois tells me it is in Chicago, and is hosted by psychz.net.

Anyone able to tell me who is at 172.107.228.54. ?

Might have nothing to do with my dropped stream, but why is the stream going somewhere else at times?

The camera went offline just now. The IP was 172.107.122.xxx

I signed up for tinycam cloud so maybe the stream is going there?

24

The 192 is an ip on your home internal network. The 172 one is an external IP.

25

That’s got to be part of it; you kinda buried the lede. I know very little about TinyCam cloud service, but, unlike Wyze cloud, the stream is NOT going directly from camera to TinyCam servers - the TinyCam app itself would have to be relaying it. This would be something putting significant additional load on your Android device, particularly if it’s doing 4 or more simultaneous streams all the time. Maybe see if you can reduce the frequency and/or resolution of what’s going to TinyCam cloud. Again, though, I know next to nothing about the service.

In other news I’ve migrated to my new 10" tablet and I was able to keep all my previous TinyCam Pro event recordings simply by copying over the whole directory from old tablet to new tablet. It still indexes and finds and plays them just fine, although I also had to export/import the camera settings. What a great app.

26

@Omgitstony

Was curious as to where the 172 was. Probably some guy named Drago in Ukraine watching me.

27

@Customer

I do know if I only watch two feeds, the cams still drop on one cam then the other quite often. This happens on both of the HD10 tabs and the HD8 tab.

I bought another app called IP Cam Viewer Pro, but after reading about it, Wyze cams need to be flashed with RTSP also, which is a deal breaker.

Checked into Blue Iris, but it is not for Android.

Will kill the cloud and see what changes.

28

I have purchased the Asus ZenWifi AX (XT8). I got this because of my streaming issue with the TPLink Deco P7 and X60. So far, I have not had any issues with this router. It provides the ability to customize as you wish. It is a Mesh Router 2 Pack WiFi 6 as well.

So far it has been working great for all of my equipment, including Wyze Devices.

29

Don’t want to jinx this, BUT all 4 cams are not dropping out and over 30 minutes have gone by.

All I did was change the tablets from 2G to 5G

The 2G must have been clogged up.

:crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::pray::pray::pray::pray::pray::pray::pray::pray:

Edit a few hours later… the dropped cams issue has not happened since switching the tablets to 5G. Got bold and now one HD10 is displaying 9 feeds at once.

:weary::angry:. It is MUCH better but the feeds are stll droppng, even with only two feeds open.

30

Is that with or without the TinyCam cloud service uploads?

31

@Customer

I have the trial cloud service and alex has offered some suggestions. So far, both the HD8 and HD10 are not dropping the feed anything like before. They used to drop quite a lot, and now maybe once every 5 minutes. I can see the data rate drop to 0 but it isn’t dropping on the Wyze app.

If a feed disappears, it comes back in a few seconds. Previously if the feed disappeared, it wouldn’t come back for a while, if at all.

Received a Fire TV Stick 4K today. Loaded TCP, added a camera, then another. Now I am up to 6 and the feeds are not dropping. Woot! So I added 3 more and now none of the feeds work on the Fire Stick, even when only selecting one feed. Ah, something else I broke that I need to fix tomorrow -_-

Added the next day - the HW+ decoder does not work with my Fire Stick. Also, I was only able to stream 9 feeds with the Fire Stick. Any more and the OS would crash to the desktop or whatever it is called in Android land.

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32

Glad to hear (well the good part anyway). Please share the TinyCam tweaks that fixed your tablet connection. I’m sure they will help others, including me.

33

@Customer

Actually, Alex wanted to know my upload speed which got me thinking I was banging my head on the tinyCam Pro wall, when it should have been banging on the router wall.

Got into the router, and spent HOURS entering every Wyze cam IP and MAC address in the DHCP reservation table. Unplugged the router and modem, rebooted and so far all 4 cams are streaming on both the HD8 and HD10.

So, it was not so much a suggestion from Alex, but rather that comment led me to not mess with TCP settings or the tablet settings.

After running the built in app for the Tenda router to accelerate WiFi (no idea what was changed) and setting static IPs for the Wyze cams, TCP has been great.

34

Glad it worked out, and thanks for the detail, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. The cameras don’t change their requested IP very often, if ever, so I don’t see why the reservation would help (unless perhaps you’re in the habit of keeping some offline, which might mean they are sometimes fighting to re-lease the same IPs). Hmm.

There is also a known issue where the cameras revert to a different MAC address (and thus get a different IP returned) but (1) that may have been fixed and (2) I thought it only happened at boot and (3) the reservation would only affect a single MAC unless both are flipping AND you ended up providing reservations for both and (4) TinyCam only uses a single IP to address the camera so upon flipping it still won’t see the cam and… I give up. :slight_smile:

35

@Customer

You are probably right about reserving the IP. Back when I had Amcrest cameras, they behaved best with a static IP.

Had the Fire TV stick 4K working great on our 55” TV and read it will hook right to a monitor, switched it over to a spare 22” AOC monitor. All the processing is on the Fire Stick, and it is better than the tablet.

36

Hey that’s kind of genius. Instead of springing for a new tablet I could have used a spare monitor and Fire stick. :frowning:

37

@Customer

The thought of using a monitor came to me yesterday, and several web sites said it could be done. Had a spare monitor with one HDMI port. Only thing I had to do was tell the Fire Stick it was not connected to my Samsung TV anymore.
Using a monitor really limits what the Fire Stick can do, unless the monitor has audio. Fire or monitor, whichever I decide on will be dedicated to tinyCam Pro for video monitoring. I still use the Wyze app for recording, notifications, etc.

Something I noticed - I can have 8 feeds going on the monitor with no dropouts for hours. If I open TCP on a tablet, some feeds on the monitor drop out. If I open TCP on a third tablet, even more feeds drop out. Guess there is only so much data on that channel that can be shared.

38

Realistically for me the bigass monitor solution would not get approved for living room use where my tablet is propped up. There are solutions to split the HDMI audio out if you need that. (We rarely use camera audio.)

Really interesting that the Fire stick works so well for you. As to the simultaneous viewing, I’m pretty sure the V2s were designed to support two streams. I bet if you reduce resolution the additional streams would survive a bit longer.

So did the TinyCam (I’d use the TCP shortcut but as an IT person I simply can’t) cloud service prove to be a big factor or not? I would think it has to be.

39

I did not sign up for the cloud because I kept getting messages that this camera or that camera were offline, even though they were not offline on the Wyze app.

I have successfully had 9 streams at once with the monitor and Fire Stick. But then the other tablets drop feeds, then the Fire Stick drops feeds. The only way to get the streams back is to exit TCP on all devices, then

As a retired mechanic who dealt with hardware, I am having a time understanding why streams drop when more tablets are monitoring the feed. My job was diagnosis, so I never accepted “because”.

40

Oh well that answer is very easy - it’s because there is no single “feed” to share!

Every connection to the camera is an individual new stream that the camera has to maintain and feed. So of course you can see how that will quickly exhaust the limited CPU and networking abilities of each camera.

41

@Customer

Your suggestion to drop down to SD quality made even more of an impovement. I have one HD8 and one HD10. The 8 has 4 cams and the 10 has 6. No dropouts for the last 8 hours. :grinning:

I dropped all the cams down to SD. My guess is even if the cam isn’t being viewed, it still uses bandwidth.

Little by little this is working out. Thanks, customer!