CCTV Issues and Fixes

Fixed

CCTV Camera only records in 2 seconds chunks

Issue: There are hundreds of recording on my W320S camera of 2 seconds only. There is another camera nearby that doesn't have this issue. All the settings are common and they are equally spaced apart from Wi-Fi but the Wi-Fi thing doesn't even matter since it earlier used to record locally just fine and it's just a local recording..

Solution: The SD Card is dead. Replace it with a new one and this time get something with a high endurance like the Sandisk High Endurance SD Card. You can check the same by putting this SD Card in PC and trying to write or delete anything from it. If it's super-slow that's the problem.

What I tried:

• Changed UPnP from on to off just in case anything else was going on.
• Tried manually recording and it did record for more than 10 seconds.
• Recording on PC with AgentDVR which also worked just fine.
• In trying to diagnose the issue I tried to move from detection recording to continuous recording and also rebooted camera just in case and as soon as I did that the SD card was no longer recognized by the camera. Now, this made me remove the camera from the CCTV physically because the last thing I wanted was to lose all the recordings from the camera for the past many days and when I plugged the camera in my PC I could see the file format had changed to RAW instead. Now, I am in the process of recovering the data on the SD Card for now.
• After I recovered everything on the SD Card with EaseUS Data Recovery (No need to use this. I just had some familiarity with this software so I used it. There are free alternatives like PhotoRec Data Recovery but I haven't personally used them).
• Then I formatted the SD card and started moving some files onto it only to see that the speed was in literally KB/s, even when deleting something they were just so slow, each item took like 4-5 seconds to delete of size of a few KBs.
• I am planning to check the SD Card with a proper software soon but these all point to a dead SD Card. Once the test is complete will let you know here.

Possible Issues:

• When I opened the camera and saw that it had the Samsung Evo SD Card, the same SD Card that has had the same issue with me earlier but on a phone and I was very very angry so I am going to keep everything as is and put in a SanDisk SD Card in the current state to see if that fixes the issue. If it doesn't, good news, will have more chance to diagnose this and will move this issue to fixed .

Note: If you ask TP-Link for help they will give you all the issues that can ever be. Their forums are horrible and even their support will give you a complete list of issues instead of actually trying to diagnose or fix it. Though, if it's under warranty and you just say you have done those issues, they do RMA(You send old camera back, they send you new one) pretty easily. I don't want to go that route because it will mean no camera for about a month or more.

Unfixed