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Unable to load video / An error occurred while loading a higher-quality version of this video

Dear Team,


on many of my older photos and videos, i get the „Unable to load video“ pop-up as mentioned in the title. I tried everything fixing it: i forced a restart of the iphone, i‘m up to date with the software, i have 70GB free to use storage, i toggled the „favorite“ butten on and off, disconnected the photos galery from icloud and turned it back on, turned on „download and keep originals“, but nothing works. Do you have an idea how to solve this?


Thank you all in advance,


Jonas

iPhone 14, iOS 16

Posted on May 21, 2023 12:49 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 13, 2023 1:28 AM

I had the same issue. It's resolved now, I accepted the new icloud terms and conditions I had been ignoring for a while that was the reason my icloud wasn't working. Now my pictures are downloading just fine. If your icloud in settings is greyed out check that you have accepted the terms and conditions. Hope this helps.

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Nov 13, 2023 1:28 AM in response to MrNail

I had the same issue. It's resolved now, I accepted the new icloud terms and conditions I had been ignoring for a while that was the reason my icloud wasn't working. Now my pictures are downloading just fine. If your icloud in settings is greyed out check that you have accepted the terms and conditions. Hope this helps.

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Dec 5, 2023 9:03 AM in response to Vinniea1987ify

That is flat-out UNACCEPTABLE. None of my videos of last Christmas will play, and they all give me the same error message. So what they’re saying is that those are gone for good? Why have I been paying for this service each year if they can’t guarantee those files will be safe and viewable in the future? Isn’t that the entire point of iCloud?

Apple needs to actually address the issue with an appropriate solution. Surely there are avenues we can pursue if they fail to deliver the product we’re paying for.

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Jan 29, 2024 8:30 AM in response to MichaelG__

Hello fellow iPhone users, I’ve found the solution to everyone’s issue.

  • Select the video you wish to play.
  • Next after you get the unable to load video message press ok.
  • Next you want to click edit video from the top right corner.
  • You’ll then see the video being downloaded.
  • Lastly click cancel and enjoy your video. (Make sure you have storage cause otherwise it might not work)


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Nov 6, 2023 6:21 AM in response to Bizabong

I am relieved to have found this page as I have started digitising all our old home videos and they were working perfectly until the end of October. Now ALL shared videos do not work BUT they do work on the original device and in my photo album, itself.


This has to be a bug but it affects Iphone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV so I am guessing it must be an iCloud issue. Do Apple read these posts? What is the best way to bring it to their attention?

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Nov 6, 2023 9:29 AM in response to Bizabong

And to follow up from above - no, it's NOT my system. My operating system is completely up to date and have TONS of extra space, etc. I've been through this so many times before. It's ON THEM. Always. They need to fix this on their end or at least provide us with the update that resolves these unacceptable bugs.

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Dec 19, 2023 10:20 AM in response to Bizabong

***Fix***


The only thing that worked for me was to click "duplicate" on my errored out videos. The new duplicate works then also unlocks the error with the problomatic file so i was able to play both and then delete the newly made duplicate.


Hope this helps someone else. My issue started after updateing to ios 17.2 on an iphone 13



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Nov 6, 2023 9:24 AM in response to Bizabong

Hi all, I have spoken to Apple again, but they are not sure what the issue is. They said they don’t have enough reports for the same but will get the engineering team to look in to it.


I have checked my shared Albums and random videos that used to play don’t play. However if you try to share them via Whatsup or other the video gets downloaded and then will play from shared album. It is a bizarre bug.

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Nov 6, 2023 9:26 AM in response to Bizabong

I have had this particular problem on and off for AT LEAST TWO YEARS, probably THREE... It's always during around a new IOS update. Surprise Surprise. They KNOW this problem. Currently, it's affecting all of my new videos and some of my old videos that are longer than 4 minutes. What's weird this time is that sometimes they would play and then when I go to another video and come back, that same video that played 3 seconds ago wouldn't play anymore. Then I wait the next day, it would play again in the morning. But now I'm back to square one - they aren't playing again. Hence, why I am here along with everybody else. It's so incredibly frustrating. I've been through this so many times before but it's sad this is still affecting so many people. Everybody, please help send your complaints to their team nonstop until they fix it.

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Nov 21, 2023 12:51 PM in response to Bizabong

Just want to say this is happening to me too. Contacted Apple Support today and they escalated to engineering and had me send in screenshots of several error messages. This is my situation:


  1. Errors are only happening on my iPhone - Mac loads photos and videos fine.
  2. I get the "Unable to load video" error when tapping on a video
  3. Photos take longer than usual to load
  4. If I take a photo and immediately attempt to send it via iMessage I get an error "Unable to Share. There was an error while preparing to share. Please try again later."
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Jan 17, 2024 8:13 AM in response to Bizabong

I'm having the same issue. I can't view the video at all and it doesn't appear in the icloud browser. Only affecting videos of 4k and 30 fps, everything else is fine. I can't edit and then duplicate the video. I can't share the video to any other platform. Viewing the video file in windows file explorer shows a smaller file size than the iphone reports, so I suspect there's a chunk of data missing in the cloud somewhere that I can't download.

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Unable to load video / An error occurred while loading a higher-quality version of this video

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