EZVIZ C8W Pro - reduce data usage

[mrzdenek]

I installed a camera at our holiday home in Germany last month, the setup is as follows:

• EZVIZ C8W Pro
• TP-Link Archer MR600 4G router
• Odido Data Only SIM card with 4GB mobile data
• I do not use the EZVIZ Cloud service, only storage on the local MicroSD card.

In the app I set the viewing quality of the image to the lowest mode 'Standard' to save as much data as possible.

This seemed to work fine, we check on average once a day shortly to see if there has been any movement and that's it.

A lot of data has been used in recent days and I am looking for why so much data has been used and especially whether and how I can reduce data consumption.

See attached screenshot of the consumption.


I also have several Hikvision cameras at home and there are of course many more settings to reduce the data consumption.

 

[trempa92]

I suppose a heartbeat is being sent every 30s counts as data usage :/

Cloud is pinging if camera is online as well camera reply back to cloud

 

[wittaj]

We have seen this happen with other types of cameras where someone forgot to uncheck the "update automatically" box and the camera upgraded and then started sending stuff to the cloud or periodic data checks that it didn't with prior firmware.

 

[mrzdenek]

I have just disabled the automatic updates on the camera. Are there any advanced settings? (Like the HIKVISION settings via the IP address).

 

[johnfitz]

Howdy @mrzdenek ... I have several similar EZ-Viz cameras at a remote site that use a spare iPhone's hotspot for internet access... they do not have a web interface like the Hikvision cameras... you can get to the "advanced" settings using either Hikvision Ivms-4200 software or the EZ-Viz Studio software...

I see the C8W can use H265 or H264... it probably defaults to using H265 (saves bandwidth) so most likely no help there... that camera probably has a default max bitrate of 4096K, so you could try reducing that to 2048K... that would definitely help... another thing you could try is increasing the I-frame rate and lowering video quality (probably set to higher or highest you could lower it to medium)...

I suspect you won't be able to use Ivms-4200 or the EZ-Viz Studio software remotely... you will probably need to run it from a PC connected to the TP-Link Archer MR600 4G router using Wi-Fi or Ethernet...

 

[johnfitz]

Cloud is pinging if camera is online as well camera reply back to cloud

as @trempa92 mentions, I see network activity from my EZ-Viz cameras even when I'm not accessing them ... I use the "Offline Notification" setting... but if I were tight on bandwidth, I would turn it off as it must cause the EZ-Viz P2P server to constantly poll the camera (it must because you get an alert in less than a minute if the camera goes offline) ... this maybe the best change you could make, assuming you have "Offline Notification" enabled...

 

[mrzdenek]

Thanks! I have now also disabled the the Offline Notification.

 

[mrzdenek]

I just checked the data usage over the last weeks and it has dramatically decreased to just 20-30mb for the days we occasionally check some movement videos, perfect!!