I have six V3s (no pan) with the old Cam Lite Plus subscription. At various times (I think about 2 years ago) they had issues with playback (playback button from Events is grayed out). Four of them worked well and I just kind of gave up on the other two.
Last year I put one back in service and it was working again and letting me see playback from Events as expected. A couple weeks ago I fired up #6, the last “problem cam” and yes, it STILL won’t show playback from Events – the button is greyed out.
The SD card is good. I can see functioning SD card playback if I manually go to the App and click the camera (livestream) and then hit the (green) Playback button from there. I’ve tried all the tricks. I’ve rebooted. I’ve left unplugged forever. I’ve removed the SD card. I’ve formatted the SD card. I’ve removed it from my account. I removed and re-added it to my Cam Plus Lite sub, but nothing is working. I even let it do all the firmware updates do their thing. It’s currently on 4.36.14.3497 (the latest, I think). Nothing has helped.
Also while going through this process, I realized the one that started working last year (#5) is doing the same thing – no playback from events, but the SD Card records and shows my feed (that I can see by clicking the green Playback button in the live view). I haven’t touched the firmware on this one (currently at 4.36.10.7146 with 4.36.13.0416 ready to be installed), since firmware updates seem to break as much as they fix.
Case in point: my four “working” (at least playback is working from “events”) cams are sitting on the very old 4.36.10.4054 (with 4.36.10.7146 ready to install). I never updated them because the two troubled cams were on later firmware and I didn’t want to break what was working.
One other weird thing: They all show up in the Wyze web portal overview but the one with the current (#6) firmware also shows live stream, whereas the other five cams show a back screen and a lock logo. If I click the lock, I get an “upgrade to Cam Plus” prompt.
I’d never actually been to this site but was forced to go there to downgrade and upgrade the cam lite plus service. I don’t actually care if this portal works, but I find it odd behavior that one of five has different behavior on the portal for what should be the same free cam lite plus “subscription” .
I was having the problem you describe with a Cam v3 around March 2024. Seems to have gotten fixed in the App. Check out this link from 2024.
" Reddit - microSD playback button is grayed out on Event Viewer
We have located the root cause and are hoping to have the fix in the next app release."
BTW, i am using App version 3.14 even though App 3.15 was just released. I am generally slow at updating to avoid breaking things too.
What app version are you using? I wonder if at least some of your problem is a mismatch between your app version and the firmware versions that you’re using, because you seem to be describing an older version of the Wyze app, which had its Cam v3 UI updated last year.[1] You’re also using really old firmware on some Cams.
While reading through your post, I was also thinking about a Fix-It Friday topic from two years ago where the greyed-out playback button was discussed. I think in that case part of the remedy involved tapping Settings ➜ Reset and then Restart. I could be conflating that with another issue, but that shouldn’t hurt anything if you want to try that and haven’t already. The main caveat there is that Reset Services sometimes mucks with Event Recording and Notifications settings, so you may want to check those afterward if you try Reset Services.
I think at this point you really need to determine your app version and figure out if you can update it. If you’re using a 32-bit version of Android, for instance, then you won’t be able to update the Wyze app to v3 or later on that mobile device. After that, you’ll need to make some decisions about updating firmware on your remaining Cams or flashing your “problem” Cam back to an earlier firmware version so that it matches the others. If you chose to do that (revert to older firmware), then you need to be aware that this is only a temporizing measure and that things may get glitchy or just stop working entirely at some point with the older firmware and app. See the information about VerifiedView (linked above) for more detail.
The other thing I’d probably do is confirm (via Wyze Web Portal and/or the app) that your Cam Plus Lite subscription is actually applied to all of your Cams as expected. I don’t have any personal familiarity with that particular subscription, and I don’t know how much longer that will continue to work, either. There’s been some recent speculation about that, but I haven’t seen anything official about an end date.
I don’t actually have any Cam v3s. My oldest Wyze Cam is a Cam Pan v3, so I’ve never personally used the older Cam v3 UI. ↩︎
