I’ve got a couple of Wyze cams purchased back in 2019, when the “original flavor” free person detection was still part of the product. I never updated the firmware, which is still on v4.9.4.169.
The original person detection has continued to work for me since I bought the cameras. But I recently got the offer email for pay-what-you-want person detection. I’d like to support Wyze, but on the other hand, my cameras work fine as they are. A few questions:
Is there any reason to “upgrade” (or not to)? Is the new person detection better than the old? (The old-style must have been on-camera, and I think the new-style is cloud based maybe. Which seems like a disadvantage to me.)
Have any other important features or fixes gone into the firmware versions that I’ve ignored? I didn’t see anything too compelling in the release notes.
I suppose I could sign up for the pay-what-you-want subscription now, and then just stay on my old firmware until the verdict is in on the new-style person detection.
Reportedly the PD you now enjoy is NOT the on-camera version, even though the camera supports it. Your clips are really being analyzed in the cloud now. And that will STOP working for you some time in October if you don’t take advantage of the name your price offer.
Thanks for the reply - that’s interesting. I should note that, to my knowledge, the PD never stopped working. The first firmware that claims to have removed the original PD was 4.9.5.94 (January 21, 2020)… Which is one of the reasons I didn’t upgrade - I was away on vacation, and didn’t want to change anything. I returned home and turned off the cameras sometime during the second week of Feb 2020. I’m pretty sure that I was still getting person alerts during that period, between Jan 21 and early Feb,
I suppose it’s possible that I in fact lost PD sometime in Feb, and didn’t get it again until whenever the new PD went live. Since I haven’t had the cameras active while stuck at home during the COVID lockdown, I can’t say for sure.
I guess I can proceed as mentioned above, sign up for the new PD promo subscription, but keep my old firmware, and see what happens after Oct 9th, then I’ll know for sure.
If anyone’s used the new PD and can speak to its effectiveness, though, I’m still interested to hear. I did some (very) quick searches, but didn’t come across anything substantial.
I’m more or less in your shoes with old firmware, never upgraded. The new cloud PD that I think I’ve been enjoying is much, much better than how Xnor performed on the same camera and location last year. Again as far as the tests I’ve heard, the XNor ‘tags’ our cameras are producing are essentially being ignored when the clips reach the cloud server.
So in short YOU and I both are using the new PD. I think.