Videos from iPhone wont play....

I'm having the same problem, but a bit more detail (maybe it's different than what tobaccoleafpie is experiencing.

I've got a video on my iPhone 3GS. It's plays just fine on the phone. If I export it from my the phone, it plays just fine (though it compresses it heavily - too heavily - though I can't find where to control for that). But, when I sync my phone via iPhoto to get the raw video off it (not the compressed one exported out of Photos), the video copies to my computer, but it's toast. I get a green screen the whole way through - it plays...like it thinks it's a video...but it's just a full green screen.

Meanwhile, back on the phone...it still plays just fine.

So I think I figured it out. Frankly, it's a bit mystifying that Apple would let this happen...but here goes...

I read some stuff about Snow Leopard and Quicktime versions...that is, when you upgrade to Snow Leopard you get, somewhat incomprehensibly, a less capable version of Quicktime (no editing, among other woes). Apparently it also plays less types of video...including, inexplicably, the videos that come off your iPhone.

The retro-fix is to install the older version of Quicktime so its player, and apps (like iPhoto that access quicktime libraries) can view the videos. Alternatively, you can use a third party app like VLC player which does play the videos off your iPhone.

I verified this by finding the original video file on my computer (as pulled from my iPhone) and trying to view it directly in the new Quicktime player (rather than within iPhoto) and got the green screen of death.

Dropped the same video file onto VLC, and it plays perfectly.

So to recap: By default, you cannot play videos produced by Apple's own phone if you are using Apple's latest operating system. This seems utterly ridiculous to me. I thought the iPhone produced video in H.264...and certainly the latest quicktime player supports H.264.

Unless I'm not missing something, this is a totally inexplicable Apple FAIL.