I’m having major issues with two Wyze Cam v3 cameras when trying to use timelapse and continuous recording to SD.
Both cameras have brand new, high-spec 32GB SD cards installed.
I’ve tried formatting them multiple times (through the Wyze app, on PC, then again in the app).
The cameras are mounted high up and are meant to run unattended, with the plan being to retrieve timelapse footage remotely.
Internet access is not constant – they only connect once a day when I hotspot them with my phone.
The problems:
Timelapse recordings almost always fail. Even when set for a 24-hour timelapse, I’ll sometimes only get 1 minute of footage.
I’ve tested different capture intervals (1 every 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute) – same result.
Yesterday I tried enabling continuous recording and timelapse at the same time. Today I checked:
Only 1 second of timelapse was saved.
Only 1 hour of continuous footage was recorded, then it just stopped.
It looks like the cameras stop recording once Wi-Fi is lost, even though everything should be writing to the SD card locally. From my understanding, internet shouldn’t be required for timelapse or continuous recording, but that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
Has anyone else run into this? Do the v3 cameras really require a constant internet connection for timelapse to work? Any workarounds?
Wyze cameras authenticate periodically with the Wyze servers. I don’t know specifically how long the interval is, but it really doesn’t matter, because any software release from Wyze can potentially break things and make this impossible.
I suggest you switch to a camera brand that does local recording with no need for authentication. @bryonhu, here’s your cue!
Sometime ago Wyze changed something in one of the firmware updates. Since then if there is no internet for 30 minutes the camera’s recordings get stored in a different folder, usually named with the cam’s release date. Don’t remember exactly the name but if you remove the SD card and view it on a computer you should be able to find the folder.
When there is no wifi signal for 30 minutes the camera will reboot, and it will keep doing that every 30 minutes. These cams require a wifi connection to operate properly.
I might be wrong, but I think I’ve seen them live stream locally for more than 30 minutes uninterrupted without internet connection. If they reboot every 30 minutes than the live stream will get interupted as well. @K6CCC can collaborate as I think he’s using them as dash cams.
Yeah, it supposedly uses the firmware’s date as the new camera time and uses that timestamp when creating new clips. It’s awful design why Wyze chose to use that strange date instead of a set date in the past.
I’m not sure about the time lapse feature specifically, and I don’t own any Cam v3s, so I can’t test that specifically, but I wonder if that model uses the same folder structure on the microSD card as Cam v4. When I pull the card from a Cam v4 after recording a time lapse, I can see a time_lapse folder in the root directory that contains the recording. I’d be curious if your Cam v3s show this and have anything useful that you could retrieve. (I realize this may not be practical because of the mount heights. I’m just speculating.)
I think the uptime beyond 30 minutes may depend upon which firmware version the camera is using, as demonstrated by @grapefruityoda’s research and posts, helpfully linked by @peepeep!
The one official mention of this that always comes to mind in this kind of situation is this:
Because of that, I’ve read of some users setting up local NTP servers so that the Cams don’t reboot when a time sync fails, and I wonder if something like that might be an option for wherever you have the Cam v3s installed. This is where an easier decision might be to just choose a different product, depending on the need and use case.
That’s the point, as I understand it, though I could’ve articulated it more completely: Some users have set up local NTP servers (like on a Wi-Fi router that the camera connects to) so that the time sync calls don’t fail when there’s no Internet connection upstream of whatever is providing NTP to the cameras, and that prevents the camera reboots that muck up the microSD recording timeline.
They used to, but with one of the latest updates, the v3 now does the same as many other cams and reboots. That’s why the date/time gets reset, it can’t contact NTP to get the current time.
My old Asus router supported NTP intercept and would respond to any device asking for time (regardless of the server it is attempting to ask for time, basically spoofing the IP of the response) even if the internet is down. But I’m guessing people using these cams in a place with no internet probably don’t want to find, carry, and power a router with that feature.
I mean long story short, these are cloud/internet cams. Attempting to use them without internet is going to have some abnormalities. Just not what they were designed for.
@mrnikpalmer, just to try to close the loop on the references to NTP, reboots, and updates, if you take a look at some of @grapefruityoda’s posts you might be able to pick an older firmware version that is unaffected by this problem[1] and then download that from the Release Notes & Firmware page and manually flash it to the Cam v3s. Note that the flashing instructions mention moving a “folder” to the microSD card’s root directory, but what you actually want to move is the .binfile. You’ll also want to heed the guidance about using a FAT32-formatted card if you do this, and your 32 GB cards should be fine for that. I have seen Wyze Cams fail to flash firmware from larger cards formatted exFAT, just FYI.
Since the Cams you’re using for this project don’t have constant Internet access, maybe the security updates for this case aren’t as important as they might be otherwise, and flashing back to earlier firmware might be the easiest option and allow you to do what you’re trying to do with them.
According to the link @peepeep posted above, 4.36.11.8391 would be an option. ↩︎
