I was fairly excited to purchase the new battery cam pro. But two of them to finally replace my lame Blink cameras.
Hardware is fantastic in terms of robustness. But that’s about it
For whatever reason, this camera supports only HD and 2k . But the wifi on this camera is incredibly poor. I have a dozen wyzecams OG , OG tele, and panv3 cameras wired up outside and they work just fine with both 360 and SD and some spots HD modes and they connect ULTRA fast to android and apple phone apps. This new battery Pro product simply put doesnt connect nor able to ever do LIVE view . I had a BLINK gen1 outdoor camera the same spot and it was having NO trouble with 720p live view. And it ships out video events no problem.
This camera needs to be fixed with either a lower resolution mode like 360 or SD, or else fix your wifi to make AT least HD work better. It’s an outdoor battery wire free camera, you would think this would be built with rock solid wifi performing chipset and antennas to be sensitive enough to outdoor usage. It’s a major showstopper and I can’t recommend this over even Blink gen1 cameras which I consider near unusable in 2023.
By the way I have many wifi mesh nodes on all sides of the house. Nest, blink and my cheap no name cameras outside all work just fine.
I also have both Blink outdoor cameras and 4 of these Wyze Battery Cam Pros, and have many mesh nodes on all sides of my house; but I am not experiencing connectivity issues, so I wonder what the difference is on your end that is causing the problems.
You mentioned wanting to switch the cameras to lower resolution to work better. Does this mean that you have a really low bandwidth? Why did you feel like reducing the resolution would help with your streaming issues? You said you have lots of mesh routers, and with Wyze, the streaming is all done locally on the routers alone without the internet if both the camera and the phone are on the same network/router, so the resolution shouldn’t really be an issue for streaming. Bandwidth might be an issue for Cam Plus Cloud event uploads, but not for streaming the live view if you’re at home.
There are dozens of things that could be involved in your connectivity frustrations, so I am not sure what is going on for you specifically. Things I would check, if it were me:
I would log in to my router and see what it says the connection strength is with the Wyze BCPro in -#dBm
I would test disabling the 5GHz band on my router temporarily to force the Wyze cam onto the 2.4GHz band, and then test and see if it works better like that. (obviously turn the 5GHz band back on when testing is done)
If these tests show the BCPro works great on the 2.4GHz band, but doesn’t work well when the 5GHz band is on, then there are some things you can do to help with this and we can talk about that later…but this might explain why your Blink cams were functioning well while this BCPro isn’t. It just means we’ll have to force the BCPro to use a 2.4GHz band instead of the 5GHz band that isn’t working right for you in that particular location…which could be for many different reasons.
Try relocating the camera to a different location just for testing purposes, maybe somewhere close to a router. Then pull out the battery, and put it back in (this will force it to reconnect to the right router with the best signal). See if it performs differently, or still has problems. This will help narrow down what the issue(s) could be.
Obviously, make sure you have the latest firmware, etc.
There are a ton of other things that could be tried to figure out what’s going on with your specific use-case, but those are good starting points.
Hey thanks for your reply. I didn’t know if you’re connected to local same wifi as your camera , that it would not stream via cloud But direct …
I tried both streaming live from my phone via cellular and wifi … I’m getting error -5 and -20 and fails to stream live.
I however make movement at the camera and eventually I see the video event but live streaming is a NO GO. I have 8 wyze cams outside. All are OG, OG tele or v3 pan cams. None of them have any issue streaming live via cellular when I’m away or local wifi. In fact my pool camera is some 100 ft away from my home and It’s pretty solid. It’s ONLY these battery cam pros. Both BCpro are much closer to my house right next to it . Weird…
Is there a way to force 2ghz wifi on these? I noticed this new product actually supports 5hz wifi bands unlike other OG cams
I’m planning to maybe moving a mesh node right next to the window near a battery cam pro to see if this helps. Not sure .
I don’t think there is currently a way to force the WBCPro to use 2.4GHz. It decides which one to use based on how strong the signal is for the 5GHz.
Just out of curiosity, did you activate the camera inside your house and then move it outside afterward, or did you activate it in the location you set it up at? I don’t know if this happens, but it is possible that Wyze Decides the network it will stay on during initial setup. So maybe the 5GHz was strong when you set it up, so it locked on to that, then when you moved it to a new location, it might try to stay using the 5GHz when it should use the 2.4GHz for the new location. I am not saying that is what happened, or that it is programmed to work that way…I would think that it would normally switch between the bands any time if it needs a better signal, but who knows, it’s possible. I never tested it to see if it switches automatically or when it switches. You could always try doing setup again from the new location, and when it asks you to choose a network, you could see if it shows the 2.4GHz band as an option and select that if it shows. I don’t remember if it showed mine together or separately. I have seen IoT devices do it different ways.
If you try moving your router, or going through setup again, or temporarily disabling the 5GHz band for a few minutes to test it out, let us know if any of those things make a difference for your situation. It would be interesting to know.