Sync movies to iPhone not working for certain video file types.

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Sync movies to iPhone not working for certain video file types.

I am running Catalina 10.15.3 on a Mac mini, and iOS 13.3.1 on iPhone 11 Pro Max.

I have downloaded several Apple Store purchased movies to my Mac by clicking the download button "cloud icon" in my library. The movies show up in the downloaded section of my Apple TV app and they play just fine on my Mac. So far, so good. Now I would like to sync those movies to my iPhone, so I go over to the finder and I select my iPhone in the finder sidebar and choose the movies sync tab view. At this point some of my downloaded movies show up in the movies "Sync" list and others do not. I looked at the movie file types and noticed that all the ones that are of file type "Protected MPEG-4 video file" (.m4v) show up in the sync list and all the movies which are of file type "HLS video" (.movpkg) do not. Is there some specific way I should be downloading my movies to make this work?

How do I download a movie to my Apple TV App, which will allow me to later sync the file to my iPhone?

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Feb 29, 2020 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

DadToTheBear

Level 1

27 points

Apr 3, 2020 10:58 AM in response to oneinfinitemonkey

From an existing answer on another thread: Huffman1132 Q (Jan 17, 2020), answer by kslksl (Feb 18, 2020), hopefully linked correctly...

"I just finally figured this out as I was facing the same issue and movies downloaded on our mac computer would not play on our Apple TV.

I went to TV app > Preferences > Playback and made sure both "Download Multichannel Audio" and "Download HDR when available" were unchecked. When I restarted the movie download it came down as an m4v file."

I tried this myself on my Mac, and it worked to switch downloads from .movpkg to .m4v. Unless something has changed, .m4v files should be as easy to sync Mac -> iPhone / iPad as before.

A follow-up issue: how to download on iPhones or iPads to get .m4v files to transfer back to a Mac? I tried downloading on my iPhone and got a .movpkg file (seems to be the new default), which I cannot sync back to my Mac. Does anyone know how to do this?

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Sync movies to iPhone not working for certain video file types.

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