The app is a piece of crap, and so are the camera’s networking capabilities

Yes you can slide to where you want to watch, but once at that point, a 2X or 4X speed would be great.
This is what I meant by fast forward, basically I don’t want to watch at real time.

Maybe when everything is configured correctly (mine wasn’t) and motion sensing gives you a clue as to where you want to watch, 2X is not as big a deal, but when I didn’t have the motion sensing set correct, I had to watch 1 hour in real time. Felt like I was going in -2X.

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I switched all my cameras to RSTP and use SecuritySpy to monitor, notify and keep videos stored on my hard drive. I can review from anywhere, anytime. I don’t rely on Wyze uploads.
If Wyze had a system where I could monitor the cameras from my computer, they would be perfect, but RSTP is a good work around.
I love the cameras and if I had one wish, it would be a higher rate of video capture. The ease of setup and operation is great.

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Viewing events is accessing WYZE servers not the camera. The camera may have had a bad connection when trying to upload the clip I suppose.

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How did you set up the RSTP? any links or anything?

https://bensoftware.com/blog/adding-a-camera-unknown-to-securityspy/

also

( some pro some con )

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=WYZE+RTSP

My point was that, even with a VPN, my access to my cameras remotely via the AT&T data network is fine. The original comment didn’t indicate the problem was a potential throttling problem.

Are you saying that when I use my VPN, AT&T can’t throttle back my data?

I guess I’m not sure what’s “kind of funny,” but I’m not a tech wizard so I hope you can shed light on what you mean.

I cannot speak for @Customer , but in my experience, in addition to prevent hacking at a coffee shop, a common reasons to use a VPN is to prevent your ISP from seeing what you’re doing on the net.

And one reason to do that would be that several cellular providers have been known to be throttling video streams - limiting streams to 720p for example.

So if they can’t read your VPN protected data stream, they don’t know you’re streaming video and don’t throttle it. Obviously they ~could~ throttle it, and do when you hit data caps, etc.

Many VPN’s bring a speed hit due to the extra encrypting and overloaded VPN servers, and I’m not sure if a Wyze stream would trigger and ISP throttling, but it’s definitely a way around ISP scrutiny.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATT/comments/9d0osx/video_throttling/

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I don’t think data throttling is a problem anyway. I have one camera on a 7 mbps connection. Viewing live video and events usually work fine.
I have had problems but I think it was related to the SD card being used.

Sodcam is correct. It’s not that they “can’t” throttle your data; it’s that they can’t throttle ONLY your Wyzecam traffic, because they won’t KNOW you’re sending Wyzecam traffic. One of the reasons people use VPNs is to keep intermediaries such as your ISP from seeing not just the contents of your transmissions but what kind of transmissions they are. That is, a VPN to your home network would keep your mobile carrier from throttling video traffic… If in fact they were doing it at all. No idea what AT&T is doing, this is theoretical.

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Yes, I noticed that the SD card is not very compatible with the Pan Cam cameras and not quite sure if it’s the camera or the SD card at fault.

Yeah, the privacy thing is why I use a VPN. I rarely if ever stream video from my iPhone when I’m not on a WiFi network (data caps and all). The only time I ever do it is to look at my Wyze vids, and, I don’t always have the VPN connected when I’m out and about. I’ll have to do some spot-testing with disabling the VPN and then trying to watch Wyze Cam vids. Thanks for the info about throttling vs. data caps. I only knew about the data caps, and, the privacy with a VPN, but not that the VPN can prevent throttling.

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I only read the first 70 replies and the last few posts, so forgive me if this was covered already. I wanted to share a couple things I didn’t see mentioned that might help.

First, I understand your frustration. I’m not entirely happy with my setup either but I wanted to pass on a few lessons that I have learned and some thoughts that might be helpful to you.

First of all, as far as Wi-Fi routers and buying the biggest baddass wireless router out there you’re actually going to find that isn’t going to cover folks like yourself and I for several reasons. Mesh might really be helpful to distribute the wireless traffic.

Some things to keep in mind:

  1. The oldest piece of wireless hardware will slow down your entire network on that 2g or 5g band. Your router will step down to the lowest speed /wifi version to be compatible, unless you modified default configuration on your router not to do this. This includes the channel width, speed, and encapsulation (wifi 3 vs 4 vs etc, formerly ac/n and b/G etc) this alone can explain your situation. Some routers have multiple 2gh bands that help if you properly distribute devices on them, or move older devices on a seperate router.
  2. You have several layers below your internet provider, wifi router, cell phone and cell phone provider to consider. Set include how wyze connects to your network, which is through the connector/bridge on one(or more which may be possible option) of your cameras. Each camera relays its data to this matter camera and it then transmits to your wifi.
    3.you have cameras that transmit a ton of data in comparison to other traffic, unless of course you have wireless TV such as roku stick. Ideally your cameras have a dedicated router. This is a great approach as keeping your iot devices seperate is best practice anyway, although you will need additional hardware /config to properly segment it from your home network devices.

Things to try

  1. test connecting to wyze app, live feeds, playback. Try it 3 times and make note how well it works, how long did it take it did it fail.
  2. turn off ALL network devices except your main wyze camera, your phone and your router. Check connectivity with the wyze app. Change the resolution on your camera to standard definition instead of HD. Test the live feed and playback features. How well does it perform?
  3. turn on additional camera, retest as above, repeat until all cameras are up and hopefully stable.
    3)if stable, turn on network devices on your network one group or device at a time, retest

You will likely find where the problem is when it stops working as expected. If it still isn’t working going to minimal setup in step 2, move your camera with the dongle next to your router, you might want to reboot your router as well so it picks up the least busy channel.

Keep in mind these are small devices that are running on low-power Hardware.

My best suggestion is call wyze support, tell them what you have tested already. I called them and was impressed! there was an issue between the wyze camera that has the dongle that communicates with the Wi-Fi and my Wi-Fi network. that connection is really important as is the connection between that device and then all your camera so there’s so many failures points here that they have to run a diagnostic sotto identify the true wear point or points. Their Diagnostics was impressive, they asked me to install a test app on my cellular phone and it was able to pull signal levels between all devices which then pinpointed where the problem is.

I really think your problem is because of Wireless congestion more than anything, or perhaps a defective dongle.

Another point is you might want to check to see what is your camera set for as far as are they on the HD or SD as far as the resolution of the resolution all the way down and see if that improves your ability to connect to him because again and I suspect your issue is the distance between your camera devices might be too far or might have a bad signal.

Go ahead and call wyze support and ask him to run a diagnostic on your set up. I was really impressed with how quickly they responded and how easy it was to get the biggest picture to troubleshoot down to the individual issues (in sure there are more than one.)

You may end up moving the camera dongle to Amory camera to see if this provides better coverage.

Best of luck, and hopefully this background info and suggestions will be helpful,

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< Too many Wyze products causing issues - #5 by myswtest >

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Excellent suggestions for troubleshooting. On behalf of all here let me say thanks for taking the time to write it down. Cheers.
P.S. That “Grammarly” app might be good to try :smiley:

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Wow, this is becoming a popular thread.
I am not going to spend the time to shutdown all the smart devices and everything connected to my network to test this. If there was some sort of log that you could read out of the devices or the app that would suggest that there is a network traffic issue I would be open to doing more forensic work.
I will also re-state that while my iPhones are on my local wi-fi network, connecting to cameras mostly works as expected. I can view HD live view videos as expected, etc. I have one issue with one camera’s playback that dumps me out, but the other camera’s playback works. And, again, the one that dumps me out didn’t used to dump me out. I suspect an SD card issue, but how would I know for sure without a log? F’n magic I guess. I also have had other SD card issues like others have reported, where it works then one day I go to check playback and NOTHING. It thinks there’s no SD card or it’s not formatted. Rebooting the camera sometimes helps with that.
Now, back to the connection items. While my WYZE app is on the local wi-fi network, it mostly works as expected. But when I’m on the AT&T cellular network going through my spectrum modem into my router, it mostly doesn’t connect to the cameras. The app will attempt to authenticate to the camera, fail and try again until it gives up. And, then if I try it over and over and have the patience, I will get lucky and maybe after the 10th time of waiting for it to connect and fail it will connect! And while I’m connected, I can gloriously watch live HD video, talk through and listen through the camera, view playback, etc, all for as long as I am connected during that session. But if I disconnect, I have to do the frustrating connection fail all over again.
So, I don’t buy that this is likely a local wi-fi strength/traffic issue. Nothing behaves like that.
I use DDWRT firmware on Netgear hardware that supports my 400MB connection. I then use a separate DIR-855L as my sole wi-fi access point. All cameras are within 20 feet of the access point. It’s a small beach condo, two cameras are outside, one is inside. I’ve also got about 12 smart lights and half a dozen smart outlets and a broadlink IR blaster with a couple of Echo Dots.
As I mentioned before too, I am hosting mail and web servers from inside my own location as well.

What’s impressive is they didn’t censor it. When you started it I thought they would dump it based on the title.

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Gotta say that with the number of devices on your network it’s very possible that one or more devices are causing some interference with one (or more?) of your cameras. I’ll say again that Wyze cameras are fairly basic, inexpensive design. Do they have any RFI shielding built-in? Did the designers even consider the cameras might be used in a device-rich environment? Is there a collective EMI field formed in the signal path of camera to access point / router? Did they imagine you’d be trying to connect through a modem / router / access point array and, thus, provide a multi-handshake ability? Are the SD cards of the robust “Extreme” quality like the ones made by Sandisk, Samsung, etc.? There are many possibilities for a glitch to repeatedly occur in your setup, and I definitely would NOT lay it all on the cameras. Maybe Wyze has a manufacturing issue they need to resolve. Maybe they have a software/firmware problem that is triggered by an as yet undetermined condition in the home environment, or maybe you just have too much gear going on that network. Who knows?
As an aside, last year our wi-fi connected printer ceased to work with our Windows 10 laptop. I did every troubleshooting step I could think of to no avail, and decided it must be that a recent “major” update to Windows 10 must have caused the problem. Long story short, after the recent Win 10 update messed with our basic file sharing on the network, I set our wi-fi connection on the laptop to “metered” as a way to prevent further Win 10 updates until I decided it would be OK. Well, it turns out that a metered connection stopped our laptop from sending the print job to the printer. Nothing wrong with the laptop, nothing wrong with Win 10, and nothing wrong with the printer or Xfinity gateway/modem … just an unforseen consequence of me setting a “metered” connection in Windows. Should I blame Windows 10? Blame the printer? Well, gee, it can’t be MY fault, can it?

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Apparently, Grammarly [sic] [1] wasn’t helpful for that last post : )
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[1] To be clear, “grammarly” is not a word, so odd a “grammar” tool / company would use that invented word.

Look, guessing at random possible causes is not productive. Your printer by the way, could have been troubleshoot through the windows event log. You would have found exactly which service was getting refused or failed and could’ve gone backwards and corrected it without guessing.

Making assumptions that WYZE spent little money on the product and therefore don’t expect it to work all the time is a silly thing to say also.

Even the cheapest Chinese chip made for any purpose can be known. I have $2 arduinos that we know how they behave and can do lots of things with them.

Again, I’ll restate that without any feedback, access to a log or something useful, it’s just wild-ass-guesses.

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In terms of the app disconnecting from the camera when trying to play back recorded footage from the SD card, then not being able to reconnect for some time, this appears to be due to the camera crashing and rebooting when playing back from the SD card.

I’ve had this problem for a while now, I haven’t narrowed down what causes it but I have a feeling it’s to do with seeking to the time you want too fast (well it’s not really too fast for the user but possibly for the camera). I’m not sure why it takes such a long time for the camera to be accessible again afterwards though.