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

In my case, I'm getting "An error occurred while loading a higher quality version of this video. Please try again later" on a MacBook Pro with over 1TB of free memory, trying to download from my iCloud account which has more than 1TB available. Incredibly frustrating to pay close to $40/month now for Apple One and not be able to use (or trust) one of the foundational services: photo and video storage.

I've logged out of iCloud and logged back in; restarted my computer; all the usual fixes. I'm currently downloading all of my photos and video to my laptop from the cloud, so that -- hopefully -- I'll be able to access them when I need to.

Did my message just got deleted from this thread?? I updated my situation. So most of my videos are apparently gone… yes, apple responded to me and my videos are gone!! So im not happy right now, i got like 4000 videos on icloud since launch of iphone 4… and they say theres nothing they can do… sorry my bad english but yea this is the situation now.. like 1/3 of the videos get this error message..

Does apple delete my messages on this thread?? I have posted now 2 times about my situation and looks like they get deleted??. So the update is:

My videos from i cloud are mostly gone! I had like 4000 videos on there since iphone 4 launch.. and 2/3 of them are gone. And apple support said they cant do anything about it. Most of the videos before 2021 get this error message… not good news i mean if you concider that these videos are worth more than money to me. Everything is there and i have trusted apple…

Yes, your messages are in the thread. I think the issue is that the community default sort order is BEST, not Newest. When I sort by NEWEST I see your messages x 2 near the top.

So sorry to hear you are still having issues. My videos are working, both for new ones uploaded and ones that I uploaded back in August.

Is the problem only with the videos in the shared album or does it effect any videos uploaded to the cloud?

My issue was only with videos in shared albums. I could always view the videos in my album on my apple device.

Same problem here. I noticed that last year when I tried to edit on the fly some video I have just taken with the phone (iPhone XR with last iOS update at the time). When I edited the video (a simple cut), then I went into the library and tried to play the video.

I then got that little icon saying "Preparing video".... and nothing happened for 2 hours...

Back to December 2023 : same problem. I recorded with the record function of the phone (still iPhone XR) some video, edited them (simple cuts) then I'm trying the see the result by playing them... none of them are ready.

I tried to Stop the sync with iCloud, restarted the phone, added to favorites, etc... Problem remains. It's extremely frustrating.

My videos from i cloud are mostly gone! I had like 4000 videos on there since iphone 4 launch.. and 2/3 of them are gone. And apple support said they cant do anything about it. Most of the videos before 2021 get this error message… not good news i mean if you concider that these videos are worth more than money to me. Everything is there and i have trusted apple…

All these suggested workarounds are welcome and thank you for sharing. BUT this is still some Bull shed from Apple. If I spell correctly, I'd probably get banned but whatever. What the duck is this nonsense from Apple who makes tens of billions of dollars from just iCloud services? Maybe just hire a small team of engineers who focus on these problems would be nice. Imagine buying a brand new car, and suddenly it wouldn't start. But the only way to work around it is to turn the air conditioner one and off 150 times and then honk 10 more times or whatever to get it working. It's just nonsense. Hope this post doesn't disappear. lol

Ridiculous Apple is letting this happen to hundreds of people. Same issue here. They're locking me out of viewing or using MY OWN VIDEOS and I pay for cloud storage!! They need to seriously prioritize fixing this.

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!

FIXED - Just writing back to say this issue was completely resolved for me after updating my iPhone to 17.2.1. It has been a frustrating couple of months.

Not sure if the update will solve everyone's problems here, as there seem to be a few separate issues going on. But check your version in case this works for 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.

Had the same topic several time. One video is still not accessible after almost one year.

All videos have in common: their size - longer than 6 minutes.

My current "frozen" video is edited on the iphone. I was able to replay it after deleting editing features. But still I cannot upload or share anything or dublicate.

Very frustrating. I am really thinking about recording on oldschool cameras again. Since Jobs is no more, things are getting worse anyways. I am sticking to apple as long as I can feel his soul. Once this is vanished, I will change systems completely and do some brain jogging.

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.

I’m having the same issue. It’s very frustrating to try access older photos and videos from iCloud Photo Library.

I have been using the “tap edit and wait for it to download before hitting cancel” method for years to try circumvent the issue but it is not always reliable.

My suggestion to Apple is to add a new feature that would allow certain albums, eg. Favourites to be able to be kept offline always in a similar way you can do this with Apple Music, or photos on Watch.

For now, I’m waiting for a fix that seems to never come.

Most recent test: numerous high res photos and videos from both iPhone and drone footage not loading at all, even with 500mbps 5G connection.

this happened to me recently and I realized that all the videos where I'm getting this "unable to load video" error, were recorded when my phone was at best below 20% battery.

some are short clips, some longer, but the error is the same and I remember the point in the day where I noticed I was in the red on battery, and those are the only ones I'm getting the error.

so, maybe a preventative note for future shoots.