I’m using 4.9.4.37, so that could be our difference. I believe they only recently removed the 90-minute limit.
My cam continues to record to SD card indefinitely.
So maybe you should upgrade. The only minus for me is you have to pull the SD card to view the time lapse, but I haven’t tried your iPad trick.
P.S. – My test was also watching an analog clock up close. Good technique!
If you’re getting good results with 4.9.4.37, perhaps I’ll upgrade. But first, I’ll see if I can find the firmware for 4.9.4.28 so I can rollback if things go south.
You’re doing continuous recording to SDcard, right? Have you tried event recording? If it does one of them when offline, you’d think it would do both.
I now have done both “events only” and “continuous” recordings to the SD card on a cam that was disconnected from the hotspot for >90 minutes.
In both continuous and events only modes, any 12-second cloud clips for motion perceived when the camera was off the network were lost. So, the camera does not buffer those clips to send to the cloud later. Those are lost (as expected).
In continuous recording mode I saw no interruption of the SD card recordings after losing the network for 90 minutes. All seconds were accounted for.
In events only mode, it only records whole minutes where it sees motion. So I made sure I waved at the cam at the 89, 90, 92, and 101-minute marks. All waves were recorded on the SD card, no problem.
So, as long as you have a cell signal to prime the pump, and then keep the cam continuously powered after that (battery bank?), I see no reason 4.9.4.37 shouldn’t work for you.
But I agree, get a copy of your current version just in case. 
Wyze support -->General–> Other Topics–>Release Notes -->Wyze Cam V2 Firmware
Thanks, didn’t know where that was myself!
Hey kyphos – The notes for 4.9.4.37 say “Fixed the issue with no internet connection causing reboot”
Unfortunately, it also says “Improved the security of time lapse downloading”,
It’s so secure now we have to pull the card to download it, lol.
@gemniii @Newshound
First off, thanks to you both for comments, suggestions, pointers, etc.
With encouragement from Wayne, I updated my V2 to 4.9.4.37 yesterday, then re-ran two use cases: events-only recording without WiFi, and time-lapse recording without WiFi. Results were not encouraging.
Events-only.
At 9pm last night, I enabled events-only recording. I verified that it was capturing motion events. Then around 9:30pm, turned WiFi off. Between 9:30 and 10:30pm, I gave it lots of motion events to capture, then went to bed. This morning at 7:30am or so, returned to the camera, turned on the kitchen lights, waved at it, etc. Then turned WiFi back on, at 7:45am. While I made coffee, it had about about 5 minutes to rediscover the WiFi, reconnect to WyzeHQ, and go back on-line. Then used Wyze app on iPhone to see what it had captured. The timeline on the Playback screen was completely blank from 9:30pm through to 7:45am. According to the timeline, it had not captured any events while the WiFi was off.
Upon closer inspection, I found that it had recorded various clips from 9:30 until midnight or so. Even though the timeline was blank, I found that if I expanded the time scale then carefully dragged the timeline along, clips would start playing. There were various 1- and 2-minute duration recordings from 9:30-10:30pm. I found one at 12:05am when the outside porch light shuts off. That change of illumination in the kitchen was enough to trigger the ‘motion sensor’ algorithm. But the timeline was completely blank. I’ve seen this defect before, and have reported it to Wyze. (I’ve even sent them screen shots of the Playback window playing video while the associated timeline was blank, but their response has been radio-silence).
UPDATE - later in the day, I returned to the Playback screen to verify the times for this writeup. The timeline was still blank. I force-quit the app and then re-launched it. Having done so, the clips that were recorded after 9:30pm magically appeared in the timeline! There’s a bug (or bugs) in the code that populates the aqua bands in the timeline. So I suppose it’s Good News that the cam will continue to do event recording to SDcard in the absence of WiFi, but the recorded clips may or may not be visible to the user. BTW, the skip-forward and -back buttons don’t find the ‘phantom’ clips.
Time-lapse recording
I repeated the same test I’ve described before: programmed the cam with a 2-hour TL recording, and then killed the WiFi. After 2 1/2 hours, I returned to the camera and reconnected the WiFi.
Good news - the TL is shown in the album.
Bad news - “the time lapse video does not exist”. I can’t download it with iPhone or with iPad. That’s a major step backwards from 4.9.4.28. From reading other posts here, it’s my understanding that the recording really is on the SD card, and that I could view it if I pulled the card and mounted it on my Mac. I haven’t done so, so I don’t know if the hiccup 90 minutes after loss of WiFi is still present. (@Newshound I did notice the item in the 4.9.4.37 release notes “fixed the issue with no internet connection causing reboot”, so I’m hopeful that the glitch at 90 minutes is gone). However, it’s irrelevant if one can’t download the TL video. In my use case for recordings in the field, I won’t have a computer available with which to download and view the TL recordings. As I mentioned before, I won’t have internet either, so this whole exercise is a bit futile.
Perhaps the next release after 4.9.4.37 will fix the bug with downloading TL recordings. But who knows what other functionality will be broken? It’s apparent that Wyze needs to do a better job with QC on their firmware release process, and do a whole lot more regression testing to ensure that previously-working functionality isn’t broken when they issue a new release. We can only hope, and wait for the next release.
In events-only mode it will only capture the full minute where motion occurred. You may not see these individual minutes on the timeline without expanding it because they are so short.
If you expand your timeline and set your camera to the first minute where motion occurred, the timeline should automatically jump to the next full minute recorded once the current recorded minute is complete. So the automatic jumping to the next event helps.
I’d call that operation normal, if the timeline automatically jumped between events, like to when the porch light shut off.
The timeline may indeed look blank if it isn’t expanded. Mine wasn’t blank after I expanded it, and it automatically jumped to each event that I logged I did.
Yes, “the time lapse video doesn’t exist” is the current bug. You’ll have to pull your card to see the recording. I understand that is a problem for you, so it looks like you are between a rock and a hard place.
The time lapse no longer has the 90-minute problem anymore either from my tests. All frames were accounted for.
I understand: I did have the timeline expanded to the max, but nothing appeared. I’d nudge the timeline over minute by minute, and eventually it would find and start playing a 1- or 2-min clip that was triggered by motion in the room, me waving in front of the camera, lights going on or off, etc. But absolutely no indication in the timeline, even with the magnification at full. That’s consistent with what I’ve encountered in the past.
I got curious about the 90-minute glitch, so I removed the SDcard, mounted in my Mac, and played it with VLC (v3.0.6). There’s some incompatibility between the record.h264 file and VLC - it can’t single-step frame by frame through the file, so I couldn’t inspect the video closely as I did before. However, I can tell by comparing the timestamps to my analog clock that the cam did not lose a couple of minutes of real-time at the 90 minute mark (nor anywhere in the 2 hour time-lapse). So it does appear that they fixed the ‘reboot-after-90-minutes’ glitch in 4.9.4.37. That’s progress 
If you have a current copy of VLC, the ‘e’ key will advance the recording frame-by-frame.
Thanks! I’ve been using VLC for years, and never knew that.
I inspected my latest TL recording at/around 90 minutes in, and didn’t see any glitches. Good work, @UserCustomerGwen, for getting Dev to fix that bug!! Now please ask them, oh so politely, to fix the defect that prevents TL recordings from being downloaded.
I agree. I especially want all my cameras to continue to record as long as they have power (from battery or UPS )even if the network and router die. That may very well be the last line of defence in case of an extended power outage or an actual break-in.
I think there’s another unintended fallout from this. Even where there is internet, what if a users internet goes down? I see mention of 1.5 hours above. That’s easily possible, especially at night when they do maintenance and also the very time most properties are most vulnerable.
You could be taking the camera offline just when it’s needed most even for those with internet.
I note there is a very good reason for doing this. Why not share that with the community and allow them to feedback ideas or thoughts on this? If it is security related, you can still share whilst being vague enough not to reveal a specific vulnerability. It’s also a point to open up discussion on ways to overcome this without making connectivity a must.
I note Newshound has found that it works in some modes with a cell phone connected to it. But what happens if you want to leave it alone, either as a standalone camera, as some suggested for their cabin in the woods, or even as a normal camera where perhaps you go out for the day or to the grocery store for a few hours? Are you going to lose recording when the phone goes out of range for 90 mins? It’s not ideal.
That ‘bug’ no longer exists. It was a watchdog restart of the camera when it lost Internet for 90 minutes (to try and get Internet back), but it interfered with off-line users, and the people who wanted the watchdog were convinced it wasn’t there. So it was removed, and no longer exists in the current firmware.
You still will need authorization from the Wyze servers to start recording, however. So a cabin in the woods you can start the camera with a hotspot, then turn the hotspot off if you like.
Only if there is cellular data network with coverage at the cabin in the woods. A lot of cabins are in rural/isolated locations where cellular coverage (with data) is spotty at best.
Another roadblock is if one is out of territory, roaming on a foreign cellular network. Unless you’ve paid for roaming data support (often expensive) or bought a local SIM card with a data plan, you’re out of luck getting the camera authorized to start recording.
Admittedly, my off-line use cases for recording in the field are not the mainstream. On my latest trip, I left my Wyzecam at home and took along my trusty GoPro. The video quality is not as good as the Wyze, and it takes some effort in post-production to create time-lapse videos from a series of stills, but it works without any dependencies on WiFi, internet, or Wyze servers.
I’m working on getting someone from the product team in here to look at this but it may not be today. I want to make sure that the information I give is correct and that my wires aren’t crossed.
I had someone from the product side look in here and they said that this sounds like something that SHOULD still function now that we fixed a related bug. If any of you (looking at you, @kyphos) are running into this, please send in logs through Account > Help & Feedback > Report an Issue. Please let me know your support ticket number so I can send them over to the team quickly!
I have been testing this and it seems that audio recording to the SD card only works while connected to wifi. Have others experienced this?
One of the several problems described in this thread still exists. See ticket 172064.
Another one (which is a real show stopper for off-line use) is that if one has no access to internet, there is no way to get the camera to start recording locally (i.e., to SD card)
since it apparently now requires access to Wyze servers at boot time in order to ‘authenticate’. That’s a change from the original system architecture. It’s my understanding that this change was made deliberately and that there’s no going back. However, if this is the issue that you think “SHOULD function now that we fixed a related bug”, let me know and I will retest the use case (specifically, off-line recording with no internet connectivity whatsoever).
Are you able to configure your Wyze Cam to record to a microSD card in advance while it is connected to WiFi?
If this question is to me, then yes I was.
Edit: Sorry, I now see the arrow pointing to who the question was to.