I’m new to Wyze. I just bought 2 of the new Solar Cam Pan cameras and installed them yesterday. A friend recommended them as he’s had great luck with his old Wyze battery cams for years. I was using Adorcam cameras that had a horrible app and kept losing WiFi connection. Also got tired of recharging the battery every month.
Initially I was loving the Wyze Solar Cam Pan cameras. The app could not have been easier to follow and connecting the cams to my WiFi was a breeze. I’m only recording motion and using the SD cards only. No cloud. I put in my 4 year old SanDisk 128 GB Ultra micro SD cards which I never had a problem with in my old cameras. I formatted the cards using the Wyze cams.
The issue I’m having (and apparently so are many others as I search this forum), is the video I record shows the events when motion is detected. But when I try to view the event from the SD card I sometimes get the “no video available at this time” message and it’s as if the app cannot read the video event which it knows is there. So the picture snapshots of all recorded motion events are there. But when I go to watch them from the SD card either by selecting the specific event from the main page, or by going to Events and selecting it there, I get the “no video available at this time” message. It’s crazy cuz the event did get recorded to the SD card, it just can’t seem to find it to play it. I can also see the snapshot events in the Monitoring tab which is very cool. But again when I try to view the video from the SD card there’s nobody home. Now I have to say it seems to be an intermittent issue because sometimes it works just fine. And other times if I wait a few mins while I’m in the app, the video recording events magically appear in the timeline and I’m able to see them. So I can “eventually” see all the recordings. But it’s beyond frustrating when I can’t view an event that just took place. Very glitchy.
To rule out my SD cards I bought 2 new SanDisk High Endurance 256 GB sd cards that I will swap in to the cams tomorrow. Really hope that makes a difference. If not I’m sending these back to Amazon and I’ll try a different brand. I thought I did my homework on Wyze before I bought these cams, but I obviously didn’t do enough. Lots of complaints online about issues trying to read the SD cards. Never had these issues with my old cheap/junk AdorCam cameras. I truly like everything else about this Wyze Solar Cam Pan. It this SD card thing is a deal breaker for me.
Any suggestions are most welcome! Thanks.
[Mod Note]:Post moved to new topic with correct device model for better visibility within the community.
I don’t recall seeing reports of this issue with Solar Cam Pan, but in my own experience the connectivity has been somewhat problematic from time to time, and I wonder how much the signal issue affects retrieval from microSD cards. (I don’t know the answer. I’m just speculating.) I do think the performance of these Cams has improved with firmware updates and also with making changes to my own Wi-Fi network, but I haven’t done a lot of testing specifically with microSD cards on these.
I think that’s a good call, and I’m interested in learning about your results. Those are the cards I tend to buy for my cameras, as well, and I’ve had good performance from those so far.
I haven’t seen those for this particular camera model, but I’ve certainly seen plenty of those reports (and experienced some problems myself) with Cam Pan v3, which is where you intially posted. Hopefully having this broken out into a separate topic for Solar Cam Pan will generate some more feedback on this issue for this particular camera model.
Thanks Crease. I’ll report back my results after I put in the new high endurance sd cards. I just got them today and hope to format and install them tonight or tomorrow.
One trick I’ve found about a hour ago that helps is to forget about trying to view the videos from the Events tab. Rarely works. BUT if I select one of the cams and open up that view, then hit the Go Live button - then hit the SD button - I can almost always see the vids on the timeline and view them. So the key is to not try to open up the specific event, it instead go to Go Live first then go to SD button to view the timeline of vids and they’re all there. Little trick I found. Should not have to do this but hey it works. And again this is with SanDisk Ultra 128 GB sd cards. Maybe the high endurance sd cards will just plain work regardless of how I try to the vids. Fingers crossed
If you’re not a subscriber (Cam Plus, Cam Unlimited, etc.), then I wouldn’t expect that to work at all. Often what non-subscribers report is being frustrated because they navigate to the Events tab, tap an event in the list, tap the button to try to begin playback, and then see the app prompt them to subscribe because that area of the app plays event videos saved to the cloud for subscribers and shows static event snapshots for non-subscribers. Instead of tapping the button button on an event screen, you have a couple of options for consistent event playback from microSD recordings:
Tap a blank area of the screen where you see the event snapshot to reveal the overlay menu, and then tap the SD Card icon to navigate to the Cam’s microSD card recording timeline. View the event from there.
Navigate to the Cam’s Live Stream screen and tap the SD Card control in the icon bar below the view pane in order to load the microSD card recording timeline. Scroll the timeline to find the event you want to view.
Yeah, that’s annoying. I understand why Wyze does it, because they want people to subscribe to their services, and intentionally navigating directly to the microSD card timeline isn’t the most intuitive way to use the app, especially as a new user, but I think it starts to make sense once you get used to it and understand the limitations of being a non-subscriber.
That’s good that the older cards are still working for you then. Looks like you’ve ruled that out as part of the problem for now.
Thanks for the helpful tips. Yeah I’ve found a couple of ways to view the sd data as you described above. One way that always works is to go to Go Live mode which seems to wake up the camera. Then I can hit the SD card icon and view my events from the timeline. Sometimes some of the other ways to view an event work (when not in Live streaming mode) and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m just going to go to Live mode first from now on. Hokey but it works.
So the new SanDisk 256 GB High Endurance micro sd cards made no difference. Camera software works exactly the same is w the SanDisk 128GB Ultra sd cards. I was hoping that would magically fix the software code to make viewing events on the sd easier. Oh well. Now I have extra sd cards. I’m hoping some day Wyze fixes this issue but at least I know how to view the sd data now. The key for me is to go to live streaming (Go Live) mode first before hitting the SD icon.
Appreciate the help! Nice to have a forum to bounce ideas around.
Yeah, that’s something else I’ve found while using Solar Cam Pan. Part of that behavior may depend on how you have Settings ➜ Power Manager ➜ Power Saving Mode set. I have it enabled, so I always have to “wake” the camera and start the stream before I can really do anything else with it. For “wired”[1] Cams it’s not really necessary to “wake” them first, so you can go straight to the SD Card button to begin looking at/for footage.
I guess it’s good to know. The way you described your experience in your second post indicated to me that this is more of a process issue than an equipment problem. As long as your old cards are still good, then following the correct app pathway as a non-subscriber should let you see what you want.
You’re welcome! I agree that this is a helpful community, and I’m glad that you think so, too.
Wyze refers to their Cams that require plug-in power as “wired” and differentiates those from the “wireless” or “battery” cameras depending on where you look. All current cameras communicate via Wi-Fi, so “wired” and “wireless” sometimes confuse people. ↩︎
BTW - this is the first sunny day since I installed the solar panel for each camera a few days ago. Sure looks like the solar charging is working well. At the start of the day today my cams were at 68% and 75% charged. Now they are at 92% and 98% charged after getting good sun for 5 hours. Love this! My old cams didn’t have solar charging ability so I had to take them down and bring them inside to charge about once every 6 weeks. No more of that. Sweet!
Yeah, the little panels on these things do surprisingly well, I think. When I have some overcast days and notice a lower-than-expected battery percentage, I sometimes enable a Schedule Automation to turn Solar Cam Pan off during daylight hours and then turn it back on at night so that it has a chance to fully recover during the daytime and I don’t really have to think about it. For the most part, though, I just leave it to do its thing and don’t give it a lot of thought.
