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Important PSA: Tesla now enables dashcam encryption by default. When it’s ON, your dashcam footage can only be viewed in the car or in Tesla’s official apps. Otherwise they are completely hidden. If you want to view your saved clips in CamCutApp or any other third party software you’ll... show more
15,149 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)
22 Comments

@CamCutApp Tesla has a viewer online, you just have to login and then you can download them unencrypted

Thanks for that important detail. Do you know Does downloading them unencrypted retain the embedded telemetry? Even though I’m glad Tesla lets you unencrypt them it will be super cumbersome once I integrate wireless usb drive support which would allow you to download the clips directly to the camcut app as well as uploading them to cloud storage over WiFi

@MaxCohenMedia @CamCutApp It does, implemented the unencryption in our opensource tool too

@MaxCohenMedia @CamCutApp Interesting. How do you unencrypt? Do you need the user to log in to your app with Tesla credentials?

@MichalCerny @CamCutApp I signed in with my Tesla app, not sure about the technical side.

@CamCutApp Also if it is already encrypted you have to press the unencrypted button or unlock button in the dashcam viewer app in your Tesla!

@CamCutApp Thanks for the info! Does that mean once it’s unencrypted you can view it outside the app just like normal dashcam clips?

@CamCutApp Yes! It is a button you see in the car that you click near the button that changes playback speed. It then takes 10-20 seconds and says it’s unencrypted and it is then visible in CamCut and other apps!

Cool that’s great to know. Although it will be super cumbersome to use the wireless usb drive support that I’ll be integrating into CamCut app. The wireless drive was going to eliminate one friction of having to remove the physical device from the glovebox but now Tesla introduced another one

@CamCutApp Also for iOS and Mac Sentry Clip Viewer can play back and export encrypted clips.

@CamCutApp @JoNationLive @XanderSky

@CamCutApp Also: there's desktop tools available to unencrypt the clips again so encrypted clips can be reverted.

@CamCutApp Batch decrypt your clips and recover deleted (even encrypted) clips. Available for Windows and MacOS

@CamCutApp Thx Do you know if Tesla officially supports third-party apps retrieving the dashcam decryption keys after a user signs in?

@CamCutApp They have a different endpoint for decryption not from the official APIs so far. You would have to build custom calls to that endpoint to get the keys of each clip.

@CamCutApp So is the one-time Tesla sign-in really just for authentication, and then the app can decrypt future clips offline? Or does it need to request a new key from Tesla for every clip?

@CamCutApp One key per clip - you can cache it locally. So new clips will need reauth as the token lasts 8h

@CamCutApp Hard. Pass.

@CamCutApp I’m glad we established this is not for you. Carry on

@CamCutApp I was wondering why my dashcam usb stick worked in the car but not in the CamCut app.

@CamCutApp Why encrypt them?

@CamCutApp That's not true. Tesla has provided a website where you can decrypt the videos.
