I went out and bought another three of the newer Wyze Cam 4’s off amazon because of their sale…
I see the setup has changed quite a bit and as the usual BS razor/razor blade model goes that they’re now so fond of showed up, I saw that sexy Cam+ BS nag screen during the setup and of course promptly ignored it all.
So I have new shiney 64 GB MicroSD cards in them so what’s the catch these days? I set them to continuously record so in theory like my other 12 older Wyze cameras it “should” just record non-stop forever right?
Then when when I have an event, I should be able to just login to the camera and search for the entire video on the SD card right? I can’t see Wyze being that honorable these days so what am I missing …?
Do I have to deal with this camera live saving COOL DOWN garbage they talk about now?
Yes it will record non stop to the SD card (overwriting when it becomes full). Events will be tagged and you can tap “sd card” on the event to watch the video. You can also navigate around the other video on the SD card if what you’re looking for isn’t an “event”.
Without a subscription, you’re limited to 1 event every 5 minutes. Well technically you can have two, one motion and one sound. The video will still be recorded, it just won’t be tagged as an event more frequently than that. Even if you have it set to “event only” recording, anything that would trigger an event is recorded even within that 5 minute window, just no notification or tag (though in that mode, you don’t need tags as the timeline will show you when there is a recording).
OK, so if its continuously recording … I can’t get my head around this thing they call an event?
If its recording all the time, I get home at 4:00 see someone stole my parked car at 1:30, I login to the camera and find the video … save the few mins of them stealing the car it and that’s it, isn’t it ?
So what is an event or even a tag for that matter? (my brain hurts - grin)
I wrote a big reply and then saw @dave27 covered everything I was going to say, and even did it more concisely, so I just deleted my answer.
An “Event” is any time the camera detects “Motion” within a detection zone that is more motion than the set detection sensitivity. So, let’s say a camera needs at least 10% of the pixels in the image to change between 1 picture (frame) and the next picture of a video, if at least 10% of the pixels changed, then that would be part of an “event” and the “event” continues until the camera notices that fewer than that many pixels are changing between 1 frame and the next for a few seconds. Then it “ends” the event (if you are recording “events” instead of continuously).
In your case, where you are recording continuously, the events tab will show you when a motion “event” started and you can link to that time on the SD card to save you from having to search for it. The SD card never stops recording in continuous mode, so “event” is only relevant to let you know there was motion sometime in the last 5 minutes and you can get a notification about that, or look in the events page to see when events started.
A tag, for you, will only be to tell you when there was “Motion” or “Sound” detected (or the alarm icons). It will put a little icon on the event to show what kind of event it was. For people with the subscription they also get icons for Person, Pet, Vehicle, Package, Crying, and several other things.
Perfectly reasonable to run that way. But I will say the motion tagging makes it easier to navigate the SD card, and the preview picture on each event does too. It will make it a lot faster and easier to find the person stealing your car, as reviewing SD card video doesn’t have like a 4x fast forward or really any easy way to review a lot of video. It doesn’t affect the recording at all, just adds a little tag to the timeline and shows you the pictures in the event list.
For notifications mine are mostly disabled, I have them enabled on a cam that only has a detection zone of my front steps. If someone walks up to my door, I want to know. Then, if I’m going to be away for a day or more I have an automation that turns notifications on for a couple cams that watch the interior of both my front and back doors, and a cam that I set up inside only when I’m travelling. So when I’m away, I want to know if there is motion at any of those.
I’ve also set those two door cams (and the temporary cam) to alert me to a fire/CO alarm sound. In order for that to work, you have to have notifications enabled, but you can disable all the notification types so that’s the only thing it would notify you of. So when I say I have notifications disabled, technically they’re enabled but all types are unselected. Actually that reminds me, I no longer use the automation to turn notifications on because of that, I just go into the cams and check off “motion”.
So they are useful features, play around with them and find the combo that is right for you.
Oh OK, so the motion tagging basically creates a bookmark in the app on the screen for the camera?
I have the new ones running here now for an hour and a half …and I see the new interface and the results of the tagging I let run.
OK, I’ll play around with the settings and try a few things - it does seem happier with the upgraded software on my phone, I’m now at 3.6.0 (676) Thanks Again !
Yep, bookmark is a good way to describe it, just a notation on the timeline and a preview picture in the events list. Another benefit is that if you tap the video while in SD playback mode, there is a forward and back arrow overlaid on the very left and right, and that will skip to the next (or previous) event on the sd card. Not the 30 second skip ones, but the ones further out than that. All just stuff to make it easier to review footage.
If you do use the events list, there is one thing that is confusing, when you tap an event to bring up the full size picture, keep in mind that the “play” button below the image is to play the cloud video. Since you don’t subscribe, it will prompt you to subscribe if you tap that. So instead, tap the “sd card” icon at the bottom, which will take you directly to the SD card video of that event.
This depends on what you mean by “motion tagging”. There’s an option within the UI at Settings ➜ Detection Settings ➜ Motion Tagging that you mentioned earlier:
That’s the feature that draws green boxes in the video around whatever the camera interprets as “motion”. The things that act like bookmarks are the event markers on the microSD recording timeline, and those look like these on a green background circle:
That’s another instance of Wyze’s inconsistency, I think. If you navigate to Settings ➜ Event Recording and select All Events ➜ Customize Detections, then you get to the Customize Detections screen with a TAG column; but if you go back to the Event Recording screen and select Smart Detection Events, then Customize Detections changes to Customize Recordings, and the Customize Recordings screen shows a RECORD column instead of a TAG column. In that latter case, you can enable different markers (“tags”) for your events if that camera is attached to a subscription (markers other than “Motion” or “Sound”).
I tried to be explicit in my response since @dcason specifically mentioned…
…and Wyze uses “tag” in different ways depending on context.