Discussion: Could LAN streaming be negatively affected by Wyze cloud plans?

[RyanEwen]

I have 6 Wyze V3 cameras and I've always found that they work wonderfully and fluidly via the Wyze app, but the streams provided by wyze-bridge often appear to drop a frames or fall behind. This was not always the case for me, and I have some ideas on why this might be, but I can't test them to be sure. I was hoping to open a discussion in case others are noticing the same things I am, and maybe someone is in a better position to test some things.

To start things off, I used to think that the WiFi signal to my cameras could be cause of the issue, but today I came to find that the cameras with the worst signals are actually working the best in wyze-bridge (also, they are all above 90% signal according to wyze-bridge, so none are really 'bad' and they're all near APs). I also realized that I should see the same issues within the Wyze app if the signal was the source of the problem, but the streams are always great from within the Wyze app. I've also experimented with many different networking / WiFi setups and have even moved a couple of times since starting this jounay. I don't think WiFi signal is the issue.

After doing some reading in the docs, it occurred to me that the cameras are likely doing extra work to stream to the cloud as well as to wyze-bridge at the same time. It could simply be a matter of the streams to the cloud being prioritized over the streams to wyze-bridge, and the cameras may not have enough hardware resources or wireless bandwidth to stream to both places at the full frame rate consistently. Does anyone know if this is true?

I would test this myself by removing a camera from my Wyze subscription, but I am on the unlimited subscription and as a result I can't remove a particular camera from it easily. My thought is that if you are subscribed to a plan then yours cameras are always streaming to the cloud, but if you are not subscribed, then the cameras are presumably only streaming to the cloud on-demand, and therefore will work better with wyze-bridge. At the beginning of this post I mentioned that I didn't always have issues with wyze-bridge... I now wonder if that's because I didn't always have a Wyze subscription.

Something else I thought I could try to do to test this is to force relay mode, but that doesn't appear to be possible (just LAN, P2P, and ANY). My thought there was that if I use relay mode, then I would not be demanding a second stream from the camera, and I would see the same stream that appears within the Wyze app but via wyze-bridge. Is there a way to force relay mode?

Does anyone have any other thoughts on this hypothesis, or what I could try testing?