This is awesome, thank you! I have a few Wyze cameras and their hardware and pricing are great, but their app is pretty bad. Would be lovely to be able to use them outside the app.
The official rtsp firmware is garbage and outdated and of course still phones home. For v3 I have been playing with https://github.com/gtxaspec/wz_mini_hacks which seems very promising since it allows ssh root access.
The “outdated” knock on it is relevant because it points to Wyze once giving a nod to tinkerers, and apparently deciding it’s not in worth it to maintain that branch vs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 The “outdated” knock on it is relevant because it points to Wyze once giving a nod to tinkerers
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?
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.
> 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.
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).
Sorry, I should be clearer. The ads I’m referring to are for Wyze’s add-on features. “Try Cam Plus”, “Get Cam Protect”, “Home Monitoring”, etc. Not any third party ones.
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.
> The ads I’m referring to are for Wyze’s add-on features.
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.
