Is the recording progress for SD cards when using Wyze App in "Wyze App/Settings/Advance Settings/Manage MicroSD Card; accurate? Any help would be appreciated.
I have multiple Wyze Pan and Non Pan Cameras at home. One third are V3, the rest are V2. I am recording in HD on all cameras using Sandisk 128GB High Endurance Video Micro SDXC Cards. After two week when I go to “Settings/Advance Settings/Manage the MicroSD Card,” some cameras show 114GB use out of 119GB while others only show 45GB used. Three of the four V2 Pan cameras are almost full while one is only about 1/3 filled. Three V3 Non-Pan Cameras are almost full. One out of four of the V2 Non-Pan Cameras is almost full while the other three are about 1/3 full.
I had to think this one over for the better part of an hour.
Disclaimer : I personally have never pulled an SD card and looked at in on a PC.
As I understand it the SD file format is “mp4”. This format uses compression. For instance if you pointed 1 camera at a blank wall, and another camera at a busy street I would expect vastly different file sizes.
If your able to view the SD cards from the app without issue then I wouldn’t worry about it.
Thanks for your reply and contemplation of my issue @Secure17. I did not pull the SD card out of the camera and look at it in a PC. I am using the Wyze App on my phone to view the card storage used. Using the Wyze App I went to “Settings/Advance Settings/Manage the MicroSD Card” to view the storage. The only reason for different storage amounts showing up that I can propose is that the card may be full and has started re-writing but it does not show up in the App. Thanks again for your reply.
Once the card fills up and starts overwriting it will pretty much stay at 100% full all the time, it doesn’t erase the entire card.
So either the card is bad and is actually not recording everything, or as @ronl4625 suggested one has a much more complex “view” and isn’t compressing as much as the other. You’re sure both cams are set to continuous recording?
Maybe look back over the past few days and confirm the one with less data on it hasn’t missed any big chunks of recording, this can be seen easily in the timeline.
All of my cams at this point show between 95% and 100% full constantly, they just overwrite the oldest files as needed.
Another thought - if you’ve ever lost internet or wifi for more than 30 mins or so, some of the cams start recording to a ghost directory and that could also confuse things. Maybe the cams with that issue have borderline wifi signal and are doing that from time to time, leaving less capacity available for “normal” recordings?
May make sense to pull the cards with the issue, see what is on them in a PC, then format them using the SD formatter from sdcard.org. I do this with all new SD cards, basically the first thing I do when pulling them out of the package. Once that’s been done, the internal formatter in the cameras seems to work fine (the few times I’ve used it anyway).
Thanks for the detailed response dave27, I appreciate it. I went and looked through the playback for 3 cameras and it has been recording continuously since 12/03/2024. From what you stated and what I suspected, the bar showing amount of GB space used is probably not displaying the actual amount properly. I did pull the cards and they have all the recordings. My other hypothesis is that with the 128GB cards, for a reason I do not understand, some cards have more space than others. Thanks again.
This can happen with counterfeit cards, but usually those will only have a very small amount of usable space, like 8 gigs or less, but it depends what the counterfeiter could get cheapest.
You can do a full overwrite format with the SD card formatter utility which will tell you for sure what their capacity is (or just copy some big files to it and try to fill it up). Several of the big brand cards have utilities you can download to verify the authenticity of the card too. But a reduced capacity can also be a sign of a failing card.
That being said, failing or counterfeit cards will both usually cause the cam to stop recording, so that’s odd. May just be an issue with the file system, if you don’t need the recordings, just do a quick format with the SD utility and pop them back in and see how they act.