No timelapse vids - IP address related & possible solution?

I posted yesterday about timelapse videos not showing up in my album, and wondering what the issue could be. I deleted that thread because it felt like nobody could help but I am reposting because I think I figured out what possibly might be the issue.
I am also running my two Wyze cams in Bluestack on my computer via tinycampro, and as part of solution-finding, I installed the Wyze app there yesterday too.

Both my Wyze cams are installed on a different network. One cam does timelapse, and the clips show up in the app, the other one suddenly does not. Interestingly enough, the timelapse from the one cam on the one network showed up in the album of the other camera that does not want to do timelapses. The problematic cam shares the network with other cameras of a different make, and these cameras often seem to get their IP addresses confused, sometimes after a power out or internet interruption. The Wyze never seem to have been affected, and I have tried to assign fixed IPs to all cams, but apparently things can still go wrong.

Now I checked the Wyze app in Bluestacks, and all of a sudden, I see the correct timelapse video there when it did not show up in the app on the phone.

Could it be that my timelapse issues are not related to the app or the FW but to my IP address chaos? I know other people seem to have issues with the timelapse too, this is why I am posting this here.

Opinions?

I can give at least a few tidbits about this.

First is that as you noted, you can have cameras on totally different networks and they work fine. I do this all the time.

You should be able to set DHCP reservations in your DHCP server (for most people, that is their router). Most DHCP servers assign reservations based on the MAC of the device. You can read the MAC for each camera on the label on the camera. HOWEVER, there is a bug where once in a while a camera will decide on it’s own to temporarily change the MAC that it behaves. That results in the DHCP server assigning the wrong address because it does not have a reservation set for the “wrong” MAC. I have seen this in the past. Other people have reported it too. Note that other than using a different IP address for a while, this does NOT affect normal Wyze camera operation. One exception to that is if you are using RTSP firmware and using something like BlueIris to view the cameras via RTSP, that software is looking for a specific IP address.

Downloading time lapse videos requires that you be on the same network, but they should show up - just not allow you to download unless you are on the same network.

Hate to tell you this, but that was almost certainly an operator error (most likely selected a different camera than you intended to). Each camera has no idea what the other cameras are doing (or even that they exist).

I would not have mentioned this if it was not so unusual :slight_smile: Thank you for the input. I have reserved IPs in the router setup. So far, so good. It looked like the cam in question appeared twice, for whatever reason, with different MAC and IP. It will have to remain a mystery until the babies have fledged and I can do some maintenance work. I am not using RTSP software.

Another update on this. I had started another timelapse video, and this one does not appear in the app on my phone but it will show when I look into the app on Bluestacks. The arrow indicating a downloadable file is there but unfortunately, it does not seem to download. I have no idea what is going on.