Someone discarded a woman's purse in front of my car. I park in an alley behind my house downtown. There is a camera on my car that's inside my window. The purse's contents appeared undisturbed except the wallet was open where I could see the ID. The number for the police was busy and I couldn't pull the video from my YI home camera from my phone. I took photos of it where it sat and then carried the bag inside in case someone else "found" it and then continued to call the police and finally got through to them; they came and picked it up. I'm going to guess the camera might've saved her stuff if the person looked up and saw it in the window with the LED light on it. However, my fucking YI Home camera decided some time back in December to stop recording. There was still 25GB free on the microSD card.

I'm pissed off that I didn't catch the person who put the purse there on camera. I have another YI Home camera that has failed as well. It's time to switch brands. Arlo won't work for this as the PIR sensor doesn't work through windows and I don't need a battery powered camera. I have other Arlo cameras for inside the house when I'm out of town. I rent and don't want to hardwire a system either.

The features of the YI system were perfect for my purposes, but I want something more reliable, possibly with better quality. YI would let me view the camera from my phone, do motion detection from the video and record to the microSD card in the camera as well as send alerts with video to my phone. I'd be ok with spending up to around $400 for a system with four cameras, but I don't want a monthly membership that ties the cameras to my identity and the replacement system needs to support WiFi, mobile access, local recording as well as sending videos (it can be to email or through phone alerts), motion detection through a window, no subscription, and can have dedicated power. Is there anything better than the YI cameras that does this?

Is your camera set to loop once the card is full?

The others have worked fine. This is the second camera to fail like this. I ordered a WiFi camera and am going to make an attempt at configuring ZoneMinder on a Raspberry Pi to do the job.

Use blue iris. I hate windows but BI is the best there is, and it’s cheap.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll pick up a cheap refurbed Dell from Newegg to host it. They cost the same as a Raspberry Pi and have Windows preinstalled.