Trouble with video playback on a PC after downloading over a USB lightning cable

I have a iPhone 14 pro and I am trying to download my photos and videos to an HP laptop with Windows 10. I do have iTunes installed and have successfully downloaded video before without any issues. In the past I realized that there is always some problems associated with memory in the iPhone. Usually if you are maxed out for space you have to chip away at removing the smaller files before you can get to the larger ones. I believe the iPhone does a memory caching event and converts the video to an appropriate format and puts that conversion in cache. Unfortunately, deleting the file after transfering does not clear the cache, you would have to restart your iPhone to clear it. So a 400MB video would need about a 800MB-1.2GB amount of extra cached space available to get converted and then download. So usually I just remove all the photos, get a little bit of space and then start working on the smaller videos. When you can't transfer anymore you typically get the iphone disconnect notification crash message. I just pull the plug, delete all videos that were removed during my last cycle of transfer (I manually delete, because there is no way to autofomat the video file. I use Irfanview for the photos to put them into yyyymmdd_HHMMSS format. So I keep the video on my phone until I know I have a good download and then look at the time and date stamp on my phone and rename my transfered video on my PC accordingly. THEN I manually delete my video).

Anyway, I believe I have either gotten to the point where something is corrupted in the iPhone or I just have so many videos taking up storage that when I download a video over USB connection the sound will play in the appropriate amount of time but the video will be so slow that it continues for 5 to 10x the amount of actual recorded duration. I did just update to 17.4.1 but that did not change the situation. My problem started about a month ago (March 2024) and I hadn't had much time to address the problem. My only solution at this point is to painfully transfer a video at a time to the cloud (google drive) and then download it to my PC. I have been 100% successful using this method. The video and sound are synced up and it plays just as intended and identical to how the video plays on the iPhone. Also, I do have itunes installed. That was necessary in the past to be able to see and download videos longer than about 2 minutes.


Currently I have 110 videos ranging from 1 second to 5:45 minutes. I'm also at 124.8 GB of 128 GB used. No, I do not use iCloud or use a MAC as my primary video or photo computer. I do have the transfer to MAC or PC function set to Automatic.


Does anyone have a better idea about solving this type of a video download problem?

iPhone 14 Pro

Posted on May 13, 2024 8:03 AM

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1 reply

May 13, 2024 8:28 AM in response to mfightmaster

A specific example is a video that is 43 seconds long. It is 4K @ 60 fps (3840x2160). iPhone says the file format is HEVC and is 472MB. When I transfered it to PC via sending it through google drive it is 4K @ 60 fps (3840x2160) and a MOV that is 194MB and it plays correctly (sound synced and normal playback speed). Transfering up and down with a slower connection took upwards of 10 minutes. When I transfer the same video over USB (less than 1 minute) the file size was 4K @ 60 fps (3840x2160) at 450MB and it is reported to be 43 seconds long. But during playback the sound is broken and lasts 1 min 26 seconds and the video goes for about 2 minutes and 10 seconds. So obviously there is something broken with the file conversion process used for transfering a video over a lightning USB connection, but it works for transfering to google drive (or I'm guessing any cloud storage).

Trouble with video playback on a PC after downloading over a USB lightning cable

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