Watch Nest camera video history on a computer

If you're a Nest Aware subscriber, your Nest camera’s video history will be stored automatically in the cloud.

You can watch your Nest camera’s video history on your phone or tablet or with a computer.

To watch the video history on a computer, sign in to your account at home.nest.com and select a camera that has a Nest Aware subscription.

Note: You can only watch video history on a computer if you have an older camera or doorbell that was originally set up with the Nest app.

Nest camera timeline

Your camera's video history on a computer will include a timeline at the bottom of the screen that helps you scan your recorded video to find important events.

Your timeline serves two major purposes:

• It shows you when an event happened in your video history. Motion or sound are examples of camera events.
• It lets you quickly go through your recorded video history so that you can jump straight to events and see what happened.

 

To watch different parts of your video history, simply click on the part of the timeline that you’d like to watch from. Your video will immediately jump backward or forward and start playing from the point you clicked.

Let's take a look at the timeline’s different parts:

Calendar

Select Calendar  to watch video from a specific day. Depending on your Nest Aware subscription, you can go back a certain number of days in your video history.

For example, if you have a 10-day video history subscription, you’ll see history for the last 10 days on a rolling basis. If you don’t want to lose certain memories, you can save clips.

Time buttons

Use the HR (hour), MIN (minute), and SEC (second) options to control the scale of the timeline.

This changes how much time is currently shown across the timeline. MIN is the default view. If you want to see a shorter period of time in greater detail, including the exact start and stop times of motion or sound events, click on SEC. Or to see a wider overview of your timeline, click HR.

Note: When viewing your timeline in HR or MIN modes, events that happen close together may be close enough to look like a single event.

Left and right timeline arrows

The arrows to the left and right of the timeline help you move through your video history.

Activity Zones

Click Activity Zones  to create activity zones.

Creating or viewing clips and timelapses

Click Clips to create a clip or timelapse or view clips you’ve saved

What the dots and bars mean on your timeline

• Gray dots or bars on your timeline means that your camera detected motion or sound outside of your camera’s Activity Zones.
• Colored dots or bars on your timeline usually mean your camera detected motion in one of your Activity Zones. The color matches the color given to the Activity Zone when it was created. So if you created an orange Activity Zone around the front door, all orange dots and bars on your timeline mean that your camera detected activity in that zone.
• Multiple colored dots inside of a gray line mean that motion was detected inside of two zones while that activity was taking place.
• Dark parts on your timeline
  • If you have an event subscription (Nest Aware or Nest Aware Plus), you’ll see gaps in your camera’s video history between events. This is normal.
  • If you have a Nest Aware Plus subscription, after 10 days you’ll see gaps in your camera’s video history. This is because the app will remove video that contains no activity, so you’ll only see video clips of activity.
  • If you have a 1st gen Nest Aware subscription, you’ll only see gaps in your camera’s video history if your camera was turned off or was offline.
• The white line shows the part of the timeline you’re currently watching.

Jump to an event

Hover your mouse over an event for a preview of that event. Click an event to go to it.

Select New Clip  to create a clip of the event.

Drag the timeline left and right to quickly fast forward and rewind. While dragging, snapshots appear above the timeline. Release to play.

Player controls

Move your mouse over your video to reveal the playback controls.

The rewind button will rewind your video.
The pause/play button will pause and resume your video.
The fast-forward button skips your video ahead from its current point. The button is grayed out if you’re already watching live video.
You can forward to the end to bring you back to live video. The button is grayed out if you’re already watching live video.
While you’re watching your video history, LIVE in the upper corner will be greyed out.
You can click LIVE to jump to the present. LIVE is blue when you're watching live video.