Recording time for events

[barrp51]

Does anyone know how to extend the recording time for events? I need 30 seconds as opposed to the set 12 seconds. And maybe changing the 5-minute “cooldown” time between events might be an option? If not, any ideas on a work-around? Love the cam, but recording times are an issue for me.

[Newshound]

Longer event clips are in development, but the main reason for the omissions to date has been to keep the cloud free, which is very important to us users.

In the meantime, the best thing you can do ATM is use a SD card in continuous recording mode. Then use the time & date of your 12-second clips to playback the event in it’s entirety, regardless of length.

You can also vote for these roadmap & wishlist items:

Longer Event Video Lengths

This is under consideration but would likely take a subscription service and is unlikely to change in the near future. People are cautioned not to rely on our product for security or important tasks because the combination of a short video with a 5 minute cooldown period makes it easy to lose the most important footage. There is concern that a camera could be stolen or destroyed so a microSD card is not viewed as an acceptable compromise. This would be less of a problem if we could stream video …

Cloud Storage on 3rd party Storage Providers

It would be great to be able to upload continuous recordings from Wyze cams to Google Drive \ Amazon Drive \ OneDrive \ DropBox etc. This integration is handy for folks who already pay for cloud storage to store their videos in a safe location free of physical tampering.

[ember1205]

There are a number of issues that I, personally, have with this sort of guidance.

1. Continuous recording means that my SD cards are constantly going through the process of slow degradation. When I really “need” an event to be recorded, I will likely have issues because the card has finally died. Solid state media has a finite lifetime based on usage.

2. The camera does a generally poor job of capturing events at all, is worse when continuous recording is enabled, and the timestamps of the videos never seem to line up with anything that is in the recorded content on the SD card.

3. Recording events to the SD card is an option, but the fact that the camera doesn’t record events back to back means all kinds of missed data.

Using continuous recording on a camera that faces my driveway, I received an alert of an event. There was a 12 second clip that showed a car pulling into my driveway and parking. Zero captured events after that. Try as I might, I could not get the rough timeframe of that event to show me ANY content from the continuous recording. As a result, I have no idea who that person was, how long they were there, or whether anyone got out of the car before they left.

Events, notifications, and the ability to “scrub” through a recording all need massive improvements to make these features useful.

[K6CCC]

Reference your #3, that is incorrect. When recording to the uSD card (either continuous or events only), files are recorded in one minute blocks (for example, from 12:17:00 to 12:18:00 and another file from 12:18:00 to 12:19:00, etc). When recording in continuous mode, every one minute file is retained until the uSD card fills up and then the oldest hour is deleted. When recording in Events Only mode. if there is an event within each minute (not subject to the 5 minute cool down), that minute’s file is retain. If there are no events, the one minute file is not kept. In other words, if there is activity from 06:25:50 until 06:27:02, the three files for 06:25:00 to 06:26:00, 06:26:00 to 06:27:00, and 06:27:00 to 06:28:00 are kept. BTW, when you play back record video from within the app, you would see that as one continuous three minute recording from 06:25:00 to 06:28:00. The only time you actually would see the three separate files is if you remove the uSD card from the camera and look at it on your computer.

[ember1205]

While what you are describing may be the DESIRED functionality, that isn’t how it works on my cameras. I get 12 seconds of content with nothing surrounding. And the “five minute cool-down” (which makes zero sense to me) has to pass before it will pick anything up again.

This behavior is what I experience when using an SD card in the camera have it set to record events to the local storage. If the content actually IS there, then the problem is the extremely useless interface to view that content because there is no option to scrub through videos (I realize this is massively more difficult through a remote link compared to a video file on my local device… but, the skip forward and backward options appear to do nothing useful, either).

[K6CCC]

Sounds like you are looking at the events - NOT View playback. Select the camera (for live view), and then select “View Playback”. That will bring up the timeline to see recordings from the uSD card. Recording to the cloud and recording to the uSD card are not viewed the same way.

[ember1205]

I’ve done exactly what you describe.

[Bam]

I use the events as a guide as to where to view the playback at, typically nothing more. make sure to use an endurance cards as they are made for many re-writes

for quick refence to cards.

What SD cards are you using? have you had any issues?

As most of us know from time to time you will read about someone having an issue with the micro SD card in their camera, just a quick search for SD card in the forums will make this abundantly clear. most of these issues are not due to the camera or the software, but the card itself. Because of the abundance of options for cards on the market it is sometimes hard to find the best option when all of them seem to be the same for the most part. I wanted to make this post so that the Wyze communit…

and if it helps, ( I’m a little perplexed in understanding your described issues finding things in playback) you can pinch in and out on the timeline to get a better grasp of the time you are seeking for playback, using the jump buttons at the far left and right of that timeline will take you to the next instance of motion ( if you are recording for events only)