V2 / Pan Continuous Record to SD without App Open

I have searched the forums, Wyze’s site, and the Web in general, but have not been able to find a way to do what I want to do, which is:

Turn on continuous recording and have the recording keep going even if the app is not open to that camera.

I can record fine with the app open to the camera. But, I have multiple cameras I want recording.

Time lapse works OK, except that I need to schedule it for each camera every day. (I posted a request to schedule multiple time lapses, several years ago)

I have looked at Rules, but there is not one for turning recording on and off.

Am I missing something? Or, are the WYZE cameras not capable of doing what I want.

Thanks,

When you turn on continuous recording, you’re done. The camera will record to the SD card on it’s own forever. When the card fills up it will overwrite the oldest footage. So in HD mode with a 32GB card you may be able to go back 3 days. Switch to SD resolution and I think it’s a week.

You access what is on the card by touching the ‘Playback’ buttons under live view when it is in portrait mode, and below a cloud Event when it is in portrait mode.

Recording with the app is something you do on-the-fly, and it records to your device, not the SD card. If you have an SD card in continuous record mode, you should never need to record from the app.

Thanks.

So, I was not understanding the function of the Continuous Record setting.

A couple follow-up questions, then.

These cameras are remote, at a State Fair booth, that I cannot get to easily. How do I pull the recordings off of the cameras, before they are overwritten?

And, does a Time Lapse recording overwrite parts of the Continuous recording? How is SD space management handled with both Continuous and Time Lapse running?

You are doing some things that complicate continuous recording considerably. Normally it’s totally hands-free, except for remembering to get whatever clip you need before it disappears.

If you need to archive the continuous recording footage, then I’m afraid you will need to pull the SD card every x number of days (depending on what resolution you set and the size of your card), and copy that footage to a PC. So in the case of a remote camera, you would need to go out and swap the card with another, then bring that one back to copy, then use that card during the next swap.

Time Lapses do share space on the SD card, and the function will check the card to make sure there is enough space before it accepts the setting. The Time Lapse usage will affect the amount of time your continuous recording can cover, so you may have to swap the card a little earlier.

Unfortunately I do not have a formula as to how much the Time Lapse might reduce your continuous record time, but once you swap the card the first time you will see how large the time-lapse file is. Then it’s just a matter of what percentage of SD card space it used.

The other note is that although the “official” spec for uSD cards in Wyze cameras is 32GB or less, many of us use larger cards. That will give you longer recording time. Personally I use 64GB in all of my cameras and tested a 128GB card a while ago (it worked fine). I seem to recall that someone has tested 256GB cards as well.

As far as how much a time lapse will affect continuous recording time, it’s simply file size limited. When the uSD card gets full, the oldest recordings get deleted. As far as I know, that does NOT delete Time Lapse recording (different part of the file structure). So if you have 5GB of Time Lapse recordings on your uSD card, you will get 5GB worth less of continuous recordings. How long that is depends on quality and changes in the image.