Contact YI Home Support

by StaceUhMuhFace

The new update to the App is super frustrating. I’ve never had a problem saving recordings to the SD card, and now when I try to play back it says “no videos for this day” and then 30 min later there is video for the entire day available. Or if I watch playback and try to rewind the video or fast forward it doesn’t respond and is stuck on the original “motion tracking” activity in the alerts and I can’t control rewind or fast forward.

I just bought my second camera a few weeks ago and this new app upgrade makes me want to return it because it’s useless if I can’t even watch what is happening besides a 10 second clip. Before the upgrade, things were great, slightly glitchy app and my camera would freeze periodically and need to be unplugged. But now, not being able to watch back on the recordings is kind of a deal breaker and I refuse to be forced into paying for “cloud storage” when I have a SD card with plenty of storage. Ive had my 1st camera for over a year and never had to pay for cloud storage and relied solely on the SD card.

This seems pretty sneaky to remove the SD storage option to try and force people into paying for cloud storage. Not cool. And after reading other reviews, seems I’m not the only one considering purchasing a different brand and returning my camera. Wrong move on Yi’s part. You just lost a ton of customers.

by LitlBit71

I have had a Yi camera for several years now and the camera is great, it’s the software and all the changes over this last few months that has made me change a 5 star rating down to a 1 star rating. The software has changed from allowing users to view a live feed plus 6 second snippets of recorded past feeds for 7 days to just viewing the live feed. Which of course renders the point of having the camera useless since most people don’t just sit and watch the live feed.
They have also disabled the use of using the sd card to play back the 6 second snippet videos when motion is detected. They say they are in the process of pushing an update to allow users this feature again but I still cannot view any prior videos. I get they want you to purchase a cloud subscription but to not tell their customers they are disabling the sd card and make you think there is something wrong with the camera or the sd card is pretty poor customer service. I can view the videos from the sd card on my computer so I know there is nothing wrong with the card but it’s quite inconvenient. Not to mention the point is to be able to view both the live feed and the recorded snippets through the app on whatever device you use.

by Shg71

Each update brings the promise of better performance, yet nothing really ever changes. The latest has actually made it easier for me to access my sd card saves, but it still seems unreasonably slow and clunky to do so. (Even over my internal network, which is fast for scrubbing video on other devices, including a doorbell cam I have and live, remote play from an Xbox over wifi to my phone). I’ve also run speed tests both at the modem and on devices connected to the internal wifi and I’m getting more than sufficient bandwidth. So I’m guessing it’s either round trip to servers (which I’m guessing are all in China) or the hardware itself isn’t capable enough to keep up.

In addition, performance of the live camera is flakey at best. Takes way too long to load the cameras, then it will be stuttering or will lag (or worse crash) while viewing. Image quality, even at highest HD setting, won’t identify a face or license plate at greater than about 10ft, either.

Either way, if you’re planning on this being used as a security system, don’t. It’s at best something to use to just check if a package was delivered or if you closed your garage, but not reliable or fast enough to warn you in time if someone is actually breaking into your home.