Cameras Failing after 2 years

[MostUnhappy]

I have 11 Arlo cameras. 9 Pro 4s, 1 Essential, 1 wired Doorbell. In the last couple of days 3 of the Pro 4s and the Doorbell have begun to miss motion events. Two of the Pro 4s have not recorded any motion at all. I have restarted the cameras individually, increased the motion sensitivity, cleaned the face of the cameras, verified the strength of the wifi signal, and restarted the app. The cameras will trigger when there is motion but there are no recordings of the events. I have the full subscription with unlimited cameras (all the cameras are participating in the plan) and other cameras are posting recordings of their motion events. All of the cameras are 2.5 years old or less with the newest ones being around 2 years old. Any suggestions?

[jguerdat]

A recent change seems to be deleting videos based on your Smart Notifications settings. Disabling Smart or changing your settings for the cameras is needed. Whether this changes again is unknown.

[MostUnhappy]

Are you aware if the videos are ever created or if the change is blocking the recordings before they are made? My cameras will register motion (the indicator will turn orange) but no recordings are made. Out of the 11 cameras, 5 are currently affected. There were 3 inside the house that were disarmed. I restarted each camera (including the ones working), reset the motion sensitivity from 80 to 100 and then down to 75, I changed the Smart Notification settings to alert to different events, and I deleted the app and installed it (on one device). I also noticed that the app is letting me log into the system on two different devices which it did not previously do. This leads me to agree with you that this is related to an update or change in the software. I am still digging through the data to identify which cameras were purchased in which group as there were three different batches of cameras purchased. Thank you for your help. I don’t want to disable the Smart Notifications (although I will to get recordings) since that was one of the primary selling points of this brand of camera. My next step will likely be to replace the entire system if this is not resolved in a timely manner.

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

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@MostUnhappy wrote:

Are you aware if the videos are ever created or if the change is blocking the recordings before they are made?

There is no AI detection in the camera.

This would be done like activity zones - whenever motion is detected, the video is streamed to the Arlo Cloud for analysis.  Then if smart detection is enabled for that particular classification, the video will be stored and a notification will be sent.

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@MostUnhappy wrote:

This leads me to agree with you that this is related to an update or change in the software.

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There's no doubt about that - Arlo confirmed it on another discussion thread.

There are lots of complaints, so I am thinking there likely be some adjustment (either reversing the feature, or making it the blocking of the recording optional).

[MostUnhappy]

I can confirm that for at least 3 of the cameras that are affected, removing them from the Smart Notification list did allow recordings to be made and saved. As expected however this means that now every motion event generates a notification which is quite intrusive. I will mark this thread as resolved while I wait somewhat impatiently for Arlo to apply the actual fix to the issue. Thank you for your responses and comments