Wyze Drops "Works with Google" from app... Google still tells me "This isn't an issue with google services"

Services & Integrations
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I’m blown away here! First off, it seems like Wyze has one person in charge of this. In the replies, I see a lot of “I” instead of “We” so it appears that’s there one developer working in this issue and, sorry to sound like an a-hole but, it appears that you’re just throwing darts at solutions.

Many other companies are providing IP streams with near-analog latency… COPY THEM! if you have to. We don’t need some new ground breaking technology. Use what’s working. HLS or MPEG-DASH are easy options. Isn’t webrtc just based off the rtp protocol you’re already using?

I’m a project manager, but I will admit that I’m not very experienced in video protocols, and I don’t know if I agree with the whole “have to wait until our hub receives at least 2 clips to play” thing. Most live protocols are sending a continuous feed and now with adaptive bitrate, we should definitely be having a single feed.

Lastly, if you’re having codec issues then I would have assumed that you would have been experiencing these issues from the very beginning and saying “it was fully tested” would almost HAVE to be a false statement. The only thing that could make this true is if Google had a testing platform that was set up completely different than their production platform. However, Google hasn’t made any significant changes to the codex they support in quite some time and streaming did work just fine a long time ago. If you had a code issue then you should have been able to roll back your push to the previous version until you figured out what was wrong.

Listen, as someone who deals with software on a daily basis I know that each company’s way of doing things is completely different from the next and my way might not be how everyone at WYZE does things. All I can say is that I bought this camera a very long time ago and it has been unplugged sitting on a shelf since a few days after I bought it due to integration issues. I plugged it in yesterday thinking they would be have been sorted out by now and they obviously aren’t. It absolutely blows my mind to see that a camera company can’t figure out how to make the video work since at least back in July. Back to the shelf it goes… Maybe the trash. Sounds like I will be adding these products to the same pile as my iris by Lowe’s stuff pretty soon if things don’t get working.

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42

My guess is there is more than one person but @Frederik is the one that comments in here about, I could be wrong. I did tag him so that he can see the points you bring up.

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43

Ouch !!!

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Yes I’m the person in charge of the integrations and I’m the main person responsible for it. I’m not an engineer or a developer. I have the background and the experience but I’m not occupying this function in this company.
We have an entire team in charge of the integrations and they are specifically in charge of the doing all the integrations for Google Home, Alexa and IFTTT for ALL the devices. Believe me one person would be overwhelmed and quit in about 2 days.
And no, we are not just throwing darts, we don’t have the resources to try things randomly. The problem with the videos is as soon as we have a problem, we end up with 5 different companies being involved. So, the work is guided.

Yes. We should do that, that’s how we end with a lawsuit for patent infringement! :wink: As for near analog experience, please point me to them and I can see how they are doing it. We are working with very advanced teams on audio and video over the internet through different companies and they are fighting to gain every milliseconds possible.

We are using MPEG-DASH for Google and RTSP for Alexa. For WebRTC vs HLS/MPEG-DASH, I’m explaining the differences and the reason it’s better for the situation in the post #8 of this thread.

You don’t have to agree on it, it’s imposed by the player (ie. Google Hubs, Chromecast, Apple TVs, FireTVs and Echo Shows). This is not something that we have a choice on or that we can configure.
For the live protocols aspect, yes, that’s what WebRTC is and why we are switching to it.

I don’t do FALSE statements. I only speak the truth. We went through 3 months of heavy testing because our launch was considered high profiles and had to be validated by multiple layers of the Google hierarchy. That’s part of the reason that we missed the release date that I had talked about by 3 months.
There was nothing to roll back because we did not change the configuration. And we have confirmed since that the issue is not the codec. More on that later.

Listen, as someone who has over 35 years of software development, architected software for managing the development of airplanes, created and operated services for AWS, lead team of 120 engineers, I can tell you that not all the problems can be solved in a couple of months and if we could have fixed it by now it would have been.

Now let me provide an update on the issue.
The team challenged the findings from Google and mentioned that we have not changed the codec since the very beginning. After more testing, Google verified that indeed that the problem was not from the codec itself.
The problem is in fact coming from the resolution of the video. We are sending a 1080p signal out of the camera to the display. If the display is a Chromecast apparently it is apparently working just fine because the resolution is supported. But on Google Nest Hub, the Max resolution supported is 720p. For some reason, it was working before and we were able to stream without any problem. But the situation degraded to the point that it is not working anymore. Google acknowledges that it used to work properly and that it is a top priority on their side to see how this can be solved. We might have some work to do but there are several points that we have to consider.
1 - We have only 2 streams coming out of the cameras: 1080p and 360p. Without downscaling we would have to use the 360p stream and it should work.
2 - BUT the stream that we are sending to Google Nest Hubs is the same one use for Chromecast, FireTVs and Echo Shows. All of them are currently working and going from 1080p signal to 360p would be a disaster because the resolution will be 11x smaller.
3 - The solution that we have to bring has to account for the transition to WebRTC. the current solution goes through an intermediate (Wowza) server where we can potentially do a downscaling of the signal. BUT if we do the change there, we would have to redo a solution when we are switching to WebRTC because those servers will be bypassed as part of the process.

By the way, I got this information on Thursday and talked about options this (Tuesday) morning with Google and this afternoon with the Alexa team. I also had another conversation with Apple also on resolutions and how HomeKit is handling them in preparation for upcoming devices. So we are still looking at options right now and we are not losing our focus on the fact that this is an issue right now.

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45

@Frederik, I salute you and want to tell you that your response is absolutely the best ever posted by a Wyze employee. I hope we see more from you sir.

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46

Well, I definitely hope you stick around. Months of paying customers taking to the forums to complain and barley a peep but a couple of paragraphs about someone not doing their job and the replies start flowing. I guess doing project management has taught me how to find the “motivation button”. Kidding aside though. I’m glad that someone is giving us some answers. I know that a lot of people in here don’t know a lot about how things work on the backend and some are just here for the show *Hint *Hint big_monkey and I would like to clear a couple things up and provide some feedback to your reply.

I wasn’t saying you should put stickers over your cameras with your logo on them and sell them as yours. I was implying that you can update your code to use the newer technologies as the other companies have. (more on that later)

I can’t wait to see some of that get implemented. For now, it sounds like your are just sending your feed to a one-stop-shop (Wowza as you mentioned) and paying them to do everything and then send out the feed for you.

Listen, I know I don’t have like 400 years of software development but this issue isn’t some spider-webbing problem that is entangled throughout the entire codebase. This is a small problem that could be almost immediately fixed if someone could just track it down.

In reference to the latest update; the nest hub does not support (and has never supported to my knowledge) the 1080p feed. I’m not sure why it was every working. Maybe something to do with DASH adapting it but if you’re sending a 1080 feed that’s over 30.1 fps then that might be your issue. Chromecast supports level 4.2 whereas the nest hub only supports 4.1.

Regardless, you would think that, with a codec issue or a resolution problem you should see it in the error log. Also, did nobody try the cast.platform.canDisplayType to see what the output is against the 1080p feed you’re trying to play? Wouldn’t that have given a pretty good answer as to whether it is a codec issue or something video feed related?

Solution-wise. it would be a quick, short term solution to just downscale that output in Wowza. It would, at the very least, get us all up and working while a long term fix is implemented! And, focusing on #3 of your three step plan, since you said you have worked with AWS in your multi-decade experience then you no doubt know about Amazon Elastic Transcoder and/or Lambda. You could use that to do all your transcoding and it would be conducive to your company when making the switch to WebRTC. You could output 1080p, 720, and whatever other feeds you want.

Long story longer, I’m not out to show anyone up and I don’t expect you to spend another 45 min writing a huge response instead of putting efforts into this fix. I am sure everyone there is working diligently to find this fix but this is a video company, that sends video to different platforms to be viewed. That’s your main thing. Saying not all problems can be solved in a couple months isn’t really allowed when you’re speaking about the thing you are known for. What if your cable quit working and SEVERAL months later the head cable tech told you “I know this is what you paid to get and I know it’s the main thing we do but not everything can be fixed in 3 months.” You’d go bananas.

Again, I appreciate your detailed response (and apparently so does Monkey) but it’s not necessary. Unless you need our input as to what might help solve the issue (i DID say it wasn’t the codec before the rest of your team did ) then a much smaller but just as frequent update will be all good with me. Thanks for all the hard work and I hope you find a fix soon so we can all enjoy watching our cameras on our nest hubs soon!

P.S. I stand corrected about the remark I made about waiting on the 2nd file before beginning the stream. I didn’t know that Google was using fragmented mp4.

P.P.S. The stream plays on my Lenovo 10" smart display (Chromecast built in)but the overlay (the pause button with the LIVE indicator and progress bar) pops up as soon as the video starts playing. It shows loading for a few seconds then goes away for about a second back to the video and then the overlay/loading comes back up and loads again. This keep repeating. Each time the “played” time increments by 5 seconds. Hope this helps.

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47

110% This^. I could replace every Wyze cam in my house with Yi’s for 100 bucks, probably a wash after selling my V2’s on eBay. Instead, I chose to switch to Echo shows for viewing our sons crib and bassinet. That said, I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THIS, CAUSE YOUR PRODUCT “WORKS WITH GOOGLE”. As time goes one my faith in Wyze as a company is waning. I’ve had two v2s fail out of no where (warranty replaced for free, thankfully), sense disconnects constantly, my outdoor cam battery sucks, and this google streaming bs is unacceptable. Instead of working around the clock to make already existing products as good as they can be, you’re working on building your brand and ecosystem. That’s pure trash to me.

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I read more and more writings like this every day. Wyze is a farce and a sham. They’ll continue making money on the newbies who are inexperienced with the products, after they see how bad the products are they’ll move on like the rest of us. But as long as they’re newbies the the products wyze will continue making money. Yipee! They have headphones now, I think a coffee maker is next

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To be clear, I’m team WYZE, what I mean is I’m not on here to troll, I own some products and I would love nothing more than to see this issue get quickly resolved and everybody gets to enjoy what they spent their hard-earned money on. I don’t expect a company to yank their " works with Google " label off of their stuff every time there’s a bug but when a key feature stops working I do believe that all-time spent on r&d should immediately be halted and 100% efforts should be focused on restoring functionality to that key component. Let’s be honest, we’re not talking about a full-blown program or a native phone app here. We are talking about an issue with an integration and, while I realize there’s a lot of hoops to jump through with Google, this whole thing could have been rebuilt from the ground up and as much time it has taken to try and track down a rogue line or two of code. Dealing with APIs is a fairly straightforward process and weeding out issues is a lot easier just reading the results output from a postman client then trying to debug an entire program. I’m sure we are all happy to help in any way we can with testing in order to speed this along. Just put us to work and let’s put WYZE back in everyone’s good graces

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I have been warning people for many months not to look at WYSE. Just like the last poster stated, they pull people in with new shiny and cheap products, but almost completely stop development and bug fixing on products they have already been sold to unexpected users.

Now I read that they want to take out 180 Deg rotation and formatting of cards in the devices.
I have been waiting forever to see formatting working and after the last firmware update formatting is finally working… but now they want to remove formatting as well… what gives WYZE?

We have all seen the reviews on how bad the thermometer accuracy is. No clue on how the scale is doing.

I installed a Nest doorbell and camera 8 months ago and not a single issue! WYZE still has issues detecting if a human was detected, but Nest can tell you if it is the SAME person it detected before and lets you know by name.

Won’t even go into all of the issues the WYZE Sense and contact sensors are having.

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They are not taking out the 180 degree rotation, they had originally planned to remove it only on the WCO but have changed course on that idea and are leaving it.

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52

Fun Fact: This is exactly how I fixed my problem with getting the camera to show up on the nest hubs too!

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This quote sums it up perfectly! You are company that was built on smart home streaming. Get your [act] together and figure it out.

MOD NOTE: Post edited to conform to the Community Guidelines.

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Instead of focusing on what they should be focusing on, they come out with headphones and a thermostat instead. Wyze is a joke and a sham

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55

Whelp… Thanks for including me. I’m not as versed as you are in the technical aspects of what we’re not experiencing (but did indeed pay for). As to verbosity, @Frederik did a pretty darn good job of explaining ‘why not’ but didn’t offer much in the line of fixes coming our way… Other than that It will take time… (got lots of that). What needs to happen is that the captain of the wyze ship needs to get back on course, get some treatment for the ADHD issues that seem to plague the Tech pool and address the issues that we’ve mentioned so many times…

:monkey:

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56

i think neither Google nor Wyze are willing to fix this issue. This simple problem should have been fixed in matter of days! During the same period of time this issue has been going on, Boeing has redesigned their complete MCAS system on the 737 Max ! Google and Wyze, be honest with you customers. You should provide a daily status on progress to resolve this issue !!!

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57

this is a very appreciated response, Great example of a tech issue being communicated.

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The explanation fails to delve deeper into why in our home telling Google Assistant to Stream to LivingRoomTV works but not Stream to DenTV which are both on the same network. Stream to MasterTV is an odd ball since only one frame gets displayed and then screen freezes.
LivingRoomTV - Samsung 65"
DenTV - Grundig
MasterTV - Visio

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My assumption, and without knowing more about the TV’s, is that the ones that are working are due to the fact it works with Chromecast because Chromecast accepts a 1080p feed

60

More like real time Screaming!!!

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