Update to the SD Card recording thread

Somewhat better still than what I get when I pull the card, which is video from many months ago but no recent footage. :wink:

(I’ve long had SD issues and will be changing cards again.)

All I can say at the moment is “I am glad it’s not just me then” :neutral_face:

Would be nice to get some sort of acknowledgment of the problem from Wyze, I won’t hold my breath

Hey Tony, I’m confused :confounded: (seriously) how does that square with this (admittedly from 2019, but still):

I’ve seen other Mavens assert similar recently, so… :slight_smile:

Um, I think Tony was referring to the only two remaining SD settings, on/off and motion/continuous. As your linked thread shows, the sensitivity setting for SD was locked at 100%. Not sure about the zone.

Shh, I’m trying to see if I can get a Maven to respond to me. :wink:

(But I’m not pretending confusion. And I don’t care enough anymore, nor am I being paid enough, to think as carefully as I did back then. Also, I think you’re wrong a little bit. :slight_smile: )

Guys, thanks for your responses. I managed to get the attention of the Wyze Core Community group rep on FB, and she is going to forward it to the appropriate team.

It seems this is a long standing and ongoing problem with 256 Gig cards. The FB thread can be seen here:-
https://www.facebook.com/groups/298350110642283/?multi_permalinks=1330503370760280&notif_id=1648512747569031&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

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Private

Only members can see who’s in the group and what they post.

Do tell - I gather without removing the card. How are you getting the recordings off the card?
I don’t have any need for the upload to YouTube part, and maybe the strip out idle times part, but did you figure out a way to remotely pull the recorded files off the uSD card?
There are a lot of people around that would like to be able to do that.

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Um - yes please do share more. I do this manually now if needed.

I just checked several of my V3’s using 128GB cards and they go back 14 days recording in HD that I can access in playback through the app, and they are using the full size of the SD card. I have the camera set to Nightvision off, and always record in daytime mode. I have some cards in exFAT format and most of them are formated in FAT32. I also have a 400GB card that works fine in V3s. I have about 3 dozen cams using SD cards 128GB or larger (mostly SanDisk U1, C10 cards), all working fine.

From the Wyze Core Community Facebook group in response to my posting about this problem:-

[C.A. Clarke] Does ANYONE here get more than 90 GB of usage on a card larger than 128? Please let us know how.

[Kendríck R. Edmond] C.A. Clarke Gwendolyn Alanna Evans get around 114gb on my 128gb cards. I’ve brought this issue up before that if you use a card larger than a 128gb then it starts overwriting at around 90gb.

[C.A. Clarke] yes it’s been going on forever. Just curious if anyone in the group has the secret formula since they’re technically supposed to be supporting larger cards now.

[Kendríck R. Edmond] people have argued with me about it on here when I say something about it. I get the immediate defensive response of it works just fine for me. When I ask for screen shots they either no longer respond or say they didn’t realize it. LOL

C.A. Clarke same here. They’re lying. Not sure how that helps any of us.

[Jeremy Spangly Underpants] Author Kendríck R. Edmond & C.A. Clarke Thank you so much for also confirming the same issue, I was beginning to think I was the only one suffering or that my setup was unusual and was causing the problem. After my rather extensive chat with support via the website I was finding it difficult to get across why this was a problem and not normal behaviour.

carverofchoice - Seems you might have the secret to solving this problem then. Any screenshots you might like to share would be appreciated.

Also are you suggesting that I should try formatting the cards as FAT32 and test?

Cheers

Jeremy

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To be clear, I am not calling anyone a liar or anything as implied in that thread, I do believe you are experiencing what you are reporting, but I promise I am telling the truth about the 36 cams I have using 128GB+ cards:

See it is showing it is using most of the card:

Here I take a screenshot showing the playback all the way back to March 15th and I pulled down on the screen a little just to show that today’s date is 3/29/22 at 3:49pm MDT when I took this screenshot

I have it recording continuously in HD, and always on daylight mode (no nightvision…if you use nightvision sometimes you will get even more days/time out of it because nightvision reduces the FPS, etc). I can’t remember if this particular camera is using FAT32 or exFAT format, but all my older cams definitely have FAT32 in them because a year ago that was required for larger cards. Some of my newer cams have exFAT in them. This is one of my newer cams, so I suspect it’s using exFAT, but I am not 100% sure which format is in it since I do prefer FAT32 on principle because it is less volatile. exFAT is a little more vulnerable to data corruption from sudden power losses. It is possible that if your cams suddenly reboot while using exFAT it can cause some data corruption. This is a flaw of exFAT, not necessarily the device itself. Maybe this would explain the problem some people are having? IDK.

So while exFAT is convenient since SDXC cards come in exFAT by default, I think it is generally better to reformat SD cards to FAT32 in most cases.

This is the free tool I usually use to convert my SD cards to FAT32 when I do it:

https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/FAT32format-GUI.shtml

But again, I don’t do that for all my cards anymore since exFAT is officially supported. But yes, if you are experiencing problems for some reason, that would be my next step…try formatting them to FAT32 and I expect that will resolve the issue for you.

I’ll help answer questions or check whatever else I can for you. I can reassure you that large cards indeed do work though. Like I said, I have 3 dozen cams with large cards all working as expected.

I hope some of that will be of help. Feel free to ask more and let me know what you find out as you are trying to work through this so I can also help others since it sounds like this isn’t an isolated incident as you found others reporting the same.

This Friday there should be another “Fix-it-Friday” event for reporting bugs. This would be a great one to bring to Wyze’s attention. Whether you report it in the Fix-it-Friday thread here or on Facebook, I would recommend you report it and then tag those other users who are experiencing this to vote for it. Even if it doesn’t become the number 1 voted issue for a special report back on it, Wyze still looks at the others too and many have been addressed and fixed even when they weren’t the top rated bugs reported, so I’d highly recommend bringing it up there where the information will definitely get back to the appropriate devs and not just general support staff.

Thank you for the info, need to look into this fix-it-friday thing then :slight_smile:

Jeremy

No. I replace the card with a spare, carry the full card to a laptop and run my script on that laptop. Sorry to get your hopes up.

okay, This is very good news. can you verifyspecifically on this 400gb card that it is “mostly full”. i.e. take it out and look at it on a PC. Select all conents, and view properties and look at the size of the data. Is it 380-ish?

If so, then I’d like to compare differences between your card and my nonworking 512’s to find out what the differences are. Photos of both sides of your sd card for instance. possibly even copy out the first 10mb if you’re comfortable doing that with dd. sorry I don’t know a windows tool for that. but in a linux environment, first identify the block device by viewing the folder in the gui, then from a commandline type “mount | tail -n1” or “mount | grep ABF0” (where ABF0 is part of the card’s ‘name’ in the gui. That should give you something like /dev/mmcblk0p1 or /dev/sdb2 depending on what kind of card reader you have… For mmcblks ignore the “p1” suffix. for sdb, ignore the number suffix. Then “dd if=/dev/sdb of=/tmp/imagefile.img bs=1M count=10” or “dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/tmp/imagefile.img bs=1M count=10”

the img file will probably contain some o your actual video but not much. What it will definitely contain is all details of how your SD card is formatted.

I will compare the partition table of the sd cards, bootloader if any, filesystem format and structure, in great detail and report back because someone needs to figure this the hell out

So this stands out. What’s the story on 15+ days? On the card but not accessible by the app? Overwritten? Other?

OK so I just replaced a 256 with a 128 formatted as FAT32, Will have to see how this works out

i can also confirm the 128gb will utilize most of the memory space. It’s only the 256gb that has the Wyze ‘feature’ of only recording 90gb. Maybe that will be supported in WyzeCam v4 or v5 lol