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

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.

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)

tl;dr: try making sure a video is fully synced with iCloud before moving it to a shared library

For those having this issue with videos in a shared library, I found that the problem occurs if I move a video from my personal library to the shared library before the video has finished uploading (synced) to iCloud. There seems to be an issue on Apple’s side with synchronizing the data across the libraries; a partial sync to a personal library causes the sync to the shared library to result in bad metadata, at least that’s my guess. Hope this helps some of you!

While I am still experiencing this problem on both my iPhone and my Macbook, I had a chat with support and we discovered that if I logged into the iCloud WEBSITE on my browser, all the videos were still playable *on the website* —so I was able to download a backup of my videos from the iCloud browser site (minus all edits and filters unfortunately) onto an external hard drive, which took about 13 hours. So at least the raw footage is safe. Even on the browser site, the videos will sometimes still spontaneously stop working and display a caution symbol. But reloading the page resets them back to working order again.

So between the "duplicate" workaround and the iCloud.com workaround, I am confident that my videos still *exist* and haven't been corrupted or destroyed. But it's still unacceptable that I can't get them to play through iPhoto on any of my devices.

Accepting the terms an conditions for iCloud fixed the problem.

Your iPhone maynot have enough space to store all high-resolution photos and videos from iCloud.

Please compare 

Settings>your name>iCloud>Manage Storage

And

Settings>General>iPhone Storage

This will give you a fair idea of how to manage your device storage.

Some of the links below may help

1. Manage iCloud Photos iCloud Photo Library Help - Apple Support 
2. Manage your iPhone Storage --> Manage your photo and video storage - Apple Support
3. Manage your iCloud Storage → Manage your iCloud storage - Apple Support

As of 11th Feb 2024 this stupid bug is still not fixed.

Let me share more information on this bloody bug:

> I have 3 phones, phone A (iPhone 14 pro) doesn't have this issue, phone B (iPhone 14 Pro) has this issue.

phone C (iPhone XS Max) has lightly different issue. The videos have grey thumbnails, but seconds are showing, and there's no error message

> This bug with videos also causes photo download to stop

> If I edit the videos, they will be downloaded, errors cleared, however they still have grey thumbnails

> Duplicate and delete does seem to work, this fixes the grey thumbnail as well. However it feels unsafe and stupid.

Ok, so I have this issue too, with videos recorded on macbook, they don't play on iphone or ipad, they have this error and on macbook are fine. I've talked with apple support 1h and they don't have a solution for this problem yet, meanwhile I found a temp working solution: Install another video player from appstore and they will work fine! Not with all video players will work, in my case, worked with the one with blue play icon, I don't think I am allowed to say the name of the app here. Cheers!

For me, it seems like the error was with the cloud and the download needed to be forced. I was able to recover a video with this error by duplicating the video.

I tried most of these suggestions and nothing worked. I then decided to try and duplicate the video and it worked!! Hopefully this helps.

I've found some solutions for you. Try the fixes below. I know it's too late, but it can still be helpful for someone who has the same issue on their iPhone.

1. Deactivate the storage optimization for photos. If you have activated the storage optimization for photos, your iPhone forces high-resolution videos to be stored only in iCloud and low-resolution videos to be stored on local storage. Go to your iPhone Settings > Go to Photos > Deactivate Optimise iPhone Storage option.

2. If you've enabled the data saver, turn it off. The data saver feature limits your data usage.

3. You should allow unlimited data for syncing. To do that, Go to your iPhone settings > Go to Photos > Scroll down and Tap on the Mobile Data option > Turn on Unlimited Updates

4. you can log in with your Apple ID on the iCloud website.

Any of the fixes should solve your error. However, you can also read this article, where I got these fixes that worked for me: How to fix unable to load photo or video error on iPhone

okay, this is what worked for me!

1. go to ur iCloud
2. choose apps using iCloud and click on Photos
3. check if u have ur syncing off (caused by prioritising optimisation over syncing itself lol)
4. if u do - turn it on (worked for me), if u dont - check if u have downloading originals in photos (type in Optimise storage and pick Photos)

Here is your solution go to the photo/video that will not load and tap the edit button in the top right from there it should load and fix your problem.

Low data mode prevents videos to load at high quality

turn it off an it’ll be fixed

I agree it is a bug, or a change to the supported media types that has not been communicated.

I started at chat at Official Apple Support and eventually was transferred to a senior support engineer and we had a phone call to discuss the problem. I would recommend doing the same so that they know it impacts more users.