I bought a Wyze Cam v4 for shooting grow timelapses. I inserted a 512GB SD card, let it run for several days — and in the end, there was no video, although the card space was clearly occupied by something. I took the card out, plugged it into my laptop — there were several folders inside the timelapse directory, and one of them contained a regular video recording.
I checked the manual and found out that the camera only supports SD cards up to 256GB. Okay, fine. I inserted a 32GB card into my laptop, formatted it to exFAT, then inserted it into the camera and formatted it again through the camera menu. I started another timelapse for 24 hours.
When it finished, the SD menu showed more than 5GB of recorded data. But in the end — the album was empty again. I removed the card, plugged it into my laptop — completely empty, not even any folders.
Back to the manual again — turns out timelapse is limited to 2GB. In a camera that records in 2.5K. And the final file size is not shown anywhere, only the duration of the resulting timelapse.
Right now, my impression of this purchase is that it was an absolutely stupid waste of money. Completely pointless and frustrating limitations.
I don’t know about others, but anyone who is actually setting up “security” is not going to use gadgets like this, because they are useless for anything except shooting timelapses — which, as it turns out, they can’t even do properly.
Ah, that makes sense and thank you for your reply. I’ve been with WYZE since 2018 having my long suffering virtue sharpened.
To the best of my knowledge, WYZE has never taken the time to create a single user manual for any of their hardware. Maybe their WiFi routers, which were basically DOA, had a user manual? I was never foolish enough to buy one; even when they were offered at ~50% off.
Did you happen to see any files named record.h264? Those are what I’ve found in subdirectories within the time_lapse directory off root, and I’ve been able to play those in VLC media player. If you can do that, then you should be able to convert that file to .mp4 or whatever other video format you’d choose.
The only reference I see for this is in a Help Center article for troubleshooting the much older Cam v1/v2/Pan. I don’t know if Cam v4 has that same limitation. I set a time lapse a couple of days ago to try to generate a large one just to see (which is why I haven’t replied to this topic sooner), and the app told me pre-download that the generated time lapse was 1.9 GB, but the downloaded file size on my phone showed 2.15 GB. I’m going to try something larger, but that will take several days to record, and I’ll be traveling at the end of the week, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to comment on a result.
Yes, there was a day schedule folders, there was few videos in, but regular. Not a compiled timelapse or any part of it.
I tried different combinations — both 2.5K and FHD, with durations of several hours and even several days. Individual photos and videos are recorded without any issues, but timelapse just doesn’t work at all, no matter what.
Regarding the camera information — screenshots are attached.
