If it works, it works?
The “outdated” knock on it is relevant because it points to Wyze once giving a nod to tinkerers, and apparently deciding it’s not in worth it to maintain that branch vs working on the firmware that drives monthly revenue.
The RTSP firmware for the v3 isn’t even a year old (was released after June 2021), so “once was a nod to tinkerers” combined the rest of your vitriol makes me wonder if you have an axe to grind. Did Wyze kick your dog or something?
https://support.wyze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026245231-Wyze...
I might have a small axe to grind. My Wyze cams were much more capable when I bought them 3 years ago than they are today. Now the app takes much longer to load, and has the uncanny ability to insert an advertisement under my finger just before I touch the camera feed I want to view. Scrubbing through saved footage is slower now than it used to be.
It all smells like feature bloat that I can’t opt out of. RTSP was how I tried to escape that, but as their own site says, they no longer offer it for my cams.
Which platform? I’ve never once seen an ad in the official iOS app. The app was always slow to load for me in all the years I’ve used it, so that doesn’t have me riled up. My beef with them is the AI detection has taken a significant step backwards the last six months (why I flipped a bunch of my cams to the RTSP firmware).
And somehow I always seem to either click on the ad rather than my first camera, or click on a camera listed above my targeted one as the ad appears just as my finger lands on the screen.
And also to be clear, the axe I grind is small. I generally like these Wyze cams. For $20 each they’ve done a decent job. But knowing there is third party firmware out there is promising.
Ah, gotcha. I’ve seen those before, but haven’t experienced same issue with getting in way. Maybe I’m just slow to click.
> And also to be clear, the axe I grind is small. I generally like these Wyze cams.
The reason why I bought so many of them is because they don’t upload to the “cloud” unless they detect motion (or sound trigger). Yes, they phone home like crazy, but at least they aren’t streaming 24x7 to Google or Amazon or worse like some competitors products do. Add on to that that they are cheap, and I’m mostly a happy person. If only they could tell the difference between a person and absolutely nothing (no shadow, no movement, nothing!) I might still have all my cams on the mainline firmware.
I use lots of the Ubiquiti Cameras - I’ve had lots of success using them without the UniFi Protect controller app purely as RTSP devices.
with a battery life of a year? there is no competition. if you achieve this, please post it here!
If you'd like a secure setup, I'd advise a generic WiFi camera, accessible only on your LAN, and setting up OpenVPN or similar, to connect to your home network. This way you need to only trust your chosen VPN implementation, and I'd wager they are pretty secure.
Does anyone know of a good way to have a camera stream video over WiFi to my server, which can then forward it to the Internet, without passing through a third party? And, ideally, without opening ports. Burned too many times by buying cameras with streaming systems that are shut down two years later.
I think if I could get root on embedded linux on a WiFi camera, I could set up an SSH tunnel and go from there. But with the current IP camera I wasn't smart enough to get root (or a shell at all, IIRC) and it wouldn't take firmware updates.
So right now I have a terrible hacky solution where it FTPs an image to me every ten seconds, and then I put serve that... but a real stream would be way better.