This is sleazy stuff Wyze, and I will be throwing away your hardware very soon as a result (and making sure to tell all of my friends and colleagues to stay away from your products).
So HN, what are the best options for COTS open source cameras? Ideally, I want hardware as open as a RPi with software that has either zero or on-site cloud connectivity. Bonus points for being able to add a solar/battery system to run for weeks at a time and easy-to-deploy mesh network that allows me to daisy chain these deep into my forest and fields.
I have been lusting for this system for years, but it does not seem to exist.
If you’re looking for commercial standards based cameras (e.g., the ones that implement ONVIF), you have to be careful. The Chinese companies Dahua and HikVision have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of brands that they sell under. And both of these companies have been implicated in selling hardware and services to the Chinese government for exploitation and suppression of the Uighur Muslim minority population.
See https://securitycamcenter.com/dahua-oem-list/ and https://securitycamcenter.com/hikvision-oem-list/ for more information.
You can see an exact matchup in their models of cameras, if you carefully compare the hardware.
So, beyond the OEM listings above, there are other vendors selling into the market who just take existing hardware from Chinese vendors, and then resell that.
Spying for governments is one thing, but ads suggest they're willing to sell all your privacy to the next person who bids on it.
Metaphorically, I want to take the bullets out of the gun, not put on a bulletproof vest.
I had always been skeptical of the security on them. Thank goodness I had put up a rear-view blocking shield so that only the desired outside camera zone could be observed. The camera would frequently pan around to look into my living room and it would cut out any time that one particular person was on my doorstep with their mobile phone. IOT devices are overall unreliable revenue collection devices to which subscription pricing can be changed and instituted at any time. At least with the wyze cams, they are not particularly as expensive, but it does worry me about environmental pollution as these devices all get bricked. There should be better governance and probably service expiration dates posted on the boxes of each of them if this is to continue in any effective way.
Nearly every software team is fractioned between the legacy original Chinese team and the new-ish in-house Seattle counterpart. One of these teams is highly competent, talented, and composed of seasoned devs that joined a company offering extremely generous FAANG compensation. The other team is, well, the opposite of that. There is a power struggle between the factions. They don’t really work together. Changes to pull requests are often ignored if made by the “other” team. There is a lot of finger pointing and weird tattle-tale blaming from one team when the other team introduces a bug, even a minor one on a pre-pre-alpha build.
Management and product decisions seem completely impulsive, changing week to week. There must be dozens of product managers pinging individual developers everyday asking for status updates on their pet feature request. Some features get requested then scrapped half-way through development. Other major features like Cam Plus Lite are ham-fisted at the last minute without fleshing all the requirements and use case scenarios. Only later in testing the “beta” do we enjoy late night meetings to handle all the “oh shit we never considered THAT”. The amount of tech debt is staggering. EMs are powerless.
The turnover is insanely high. No one seems to know what’s going on or whose responsible for what. Nearly everyone I met had been with the company less than year. Some internal tool doesn’t work and all the documentation, code comments or git commit messages are in a foreign language? Google translate that shit and pray it makes sense.
I could go on and on. But the important takeaway is there is a lot of general confusion at the product management level, internal communication is poor, and everyone is working a thankless 12-16 hours a day building crappy software for crappy hardware.
My billing address in Seattle was used as a shipping address, rather than the shipping address I listed in the order that was reflected in the order confirmation I was emailed. Support refused to reroute or recall the parcel or send a replacement.
In the end you can't expect much at Wyze's price point, just gotta buy it from a competent reseller and reflash the firmware to a community implementation when you get it.
That’s the set of primary reasons why I bagged on the community firmware.
I've always been confused about the local recording with wyze - never finding where in the app I can bring it up - but just assumed it was there somewhere since I added the sd cards to them..
I would be extra ticked off if I was out of town and got this message that my cams would stop working unless I paid the extortion fees.
One of the selling points of this system was that you did not have to pay for cloud crap - and now that's out the window it seems.
Might be time for a new list of non-cloud needed cam systems.
I need to do some amazon reviews to put this new info as an update I guess.
c'est la vie wyze - I was always on the edge of trust / not trust.. and now you've proven true colors, which makes me worry about other things with your hardware / software.
If someone can firmware replace I'd love to know, I have three wyze cams open and in use and two brand new in a box - useless to me now.
1: https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026245231-Wyze...
1. Local storage is not going away. Local playback via SD card is still fully supported. Only the event clips which are stored in the cloud are "going away".
2. You can sign up for Cam Lite for free and end up with MORE functionality than before (person detection, longer clips, etc). You don't even need to provide a payment method, you just have to get past their pop-up guilting you into paying to cover the storage costs.
3. You can't find the playback option for viewing from your SD card? It's the giant colorful button on your app that says "view playback" when watching your live stream... how can you miss it?
I am not affiliated with Wyze in any way but I do own about a dozen of their cams (v1, v2 pan, and v3). They are fantastic for the price and have been more reliable than other more expensive ones I'm bought. They are also one of the few that provide an SD card slot. Their software is regularly updated and the app is solid. They don't use hostile user flows that push you to pay for their cloud services aside from the events being stored in the cloud.
You can also find OSS firmware that you can easy flash onto them that removes all the cloud features and keeps everything local.
There is a view playback "button" - a large one, you are right. However I expected such a button / feature to be accessible near the top or view menus.. the view playback 'button' sort of looks like a title bar imho - especially when it appears while you are watching a video clip.. maybe if it was moved, more rounded, had a shadow.. I dunno.
Maybe I've clicked it before and did not see much there? I just did it again. It doesn't show much.. and if I look REAL close - there are a couple of faint light green slivers where - wow - some video clips play if you scroll right on them.. I've never noticed this before - It seems to work as you describe..
but there is nothing really showing me that it is coming from my local sd card - it's confusing, are these from the cloud?
I was expecting a list of thumbnails with time stamps next to them, length of clips and tap to save / tap to delete.. not expecting much - but certainly did not find what I was looking for before.
Now that you've shown me where it is, I'm glad it's there - but I definitely desire to find something that has a better lay out.
The 'view playback' should be on other screens as well - and they should use the sd card icon in more places than the stop screen of cloud playback or whatever it is. imho - not a UX expert yet.
"You can sign up for Cam Lite for free and end up with MORE functionality than before (person detection, longer clips, etc). You don't even need to provide a payment method, you just have to get past their pop-up guilting you into paying to cover the storage costs."
- How confusing.. and no I don't want MORE functionality for a small fee or free - I don't want person detection (and would only use such a feature if it was disconnected from the internet / only using onboard processing / storage - I would trust netatmo.com 's cam with this, not many others) - I don't want more of my video stored in anyone's cloud. I hate the nag screen of 'share this clip to make our AI better' - I don't want to be guilted into anything.
"Local storage is not going away. Local playback via SD card is still fully supported. Only the event clips which are stored in the cloud are "going away"."
-This is not very clear in the messaging. Here is the message on my main screen now: "3 days left to keep video recording and gain Person Detection. Opt in now."
To me, this sounds like a cheap company about to brick the products unless they can raise money by getting people to opt in to sharing data and money.
I would add a message assuring everyone that local SD card storage will still function.. but the message says "3 days left to keep video recording..."
Sorry that my confusion and subsequent posts seem subpar for HN - maybe the youth of today click and tap more with all these apps and use serendipity to discover how they work. Frankly I am happy to find another brand that is easier on my eyes and brain, luckily it seems there are plenty of options these days.
When I chose wyze, it having local storage was one of the reasons I tried it - they keep pushing for cloud stuff and I will keep running for other options.
Serendipitously, I recently stumbled upon a kasa tplink cam system with local SD card storage; on display at my local ace hardware - and then I also find them at best buy.. and the price is not bad.. so I'm going to be giving their system a try. Their app may be just as bad as wyze's is - and if so I will feel meh about the software but not cry because the price, like the wyze is easy throwaway/giveaway without a tear shed.
I can look again at reolink, nightowl systems, arlo, and even Eufy or something as well - I'm guessing someone has down a roundup of local storage cams recently?
"You can also find OSS firmware that you can easy flash onto them that removes all the cloud features and keeps everything local. " - I may look into this more - would be nice to have an option for it to connect to an app that does not need the parent company's servers and such as well, although it may save time just finding something else that is already setup that way I guess.
I've also noticed recently that the FPS of the cloud recordings seems to be dropping. My V2 in particular has very jaggy looking 'video' clips in the cloud.
My biggest issue with Wyze is that the SD recording isn't reliable. I have two V3s and they will just decide to stop recording locally for no apparent reason, and with no warning. When I go back to look at footage, it will just say there's no SD card installed. Super frustrating.
It's too bad these open IoT projects never survive, even if you donate to them.