Tesla Sentry Mode Video Recordings

Our family owns a Tesla Model Y, and when we park the car in unfamiliar environments, we usually activate Sentry Mode. When the Tesla is parked and locked Sentry Mode allows the vehicle’s sensors and cameras to remain powered on and ready to record suspicious activity. In addition to automatically recording videos of passers by, several things occur if a threat is detected (i.e., car is shaken or towed): alarm sounds, headlights pulse, and an alert is sent to the mobile app.

Video recordings can be viewed on the Tesla display screen, but did you know that you can also transfer them to your computer? Simply find the USB flash drive where the recordings are stored. On our 2023 Tesla Model Y, the USB flash drive is stored in the glove box. Remove the USB flash drive from the Tesla and insert it into any laptop/desktop computer with a USB connector. In the SentryClips directory, you’ll see directories that have the following naming convention:

yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss

Within each of those directories, you’ll find an event.json file which contains metadata about the time and location of the sentry event, as well as the reason for triggering the event. You’ll also find a thumb.png file which is a 128x96 pixel thumbnail image from your front camera. But most importantly, you’ll find a series of video recordings with the following naming convention:

yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss-back.mp4

yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss-front.mp4

yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss-left_repeater.mp4

yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss-right_repeater.mp4

As you can see, the files are named based on the date, time, and 4 camera locations. There may be multiple batches of 4 videos with different timestamps, depending on the duration of the detected event. If you ever need to view, archive, or share the video recordings from a sentry event, those are the files you need. Each video has a resolution of 1280x960 (4:3 aspect ratio) in Advanced Video Coding format. Each batch of 4 videos has a duration of 59 seconds, with the possible exception of the last batch in the directory which may have a shorter duration.

I made a short video to illustrate what you can capture with Sentry Mode video recordings.