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

When did this start?

My problems started sometime between Monday Oct 30 and Friday Nov 3. The same videos played with out problems on Sunday Oct 29.

Is it affecting all videos of the same file type and codec in your shared library?

It seems like Apple has changed something , maybe not supporting mp4 and H.264 anymore.

Going to experiment with higher FFS. My videos are only 10 FFS.

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?

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.

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.

I am having the same exact issue and I have tried everything. It actually just seem to start when I upgraded to the iPhone 15. It only happens to videos from the GameChanger app (which is sports videos) The videos in my Album but when I uploaded them to a Shared album for my kids, the error occurs and can’t view the video. Frustrating!

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?

seems everyone is going through this. Just happened to me right now but only with newer videos. I cant send them via text or edit them. When i try to view them the video pauses like 3 seconds in.

I did send the videos to my ipad via airdrop and the videos play just fine on my ipad. Tried sending the videos back to my phone but they still wont load on my phone. I have plenty of storange and didnt make any changes in my settings so idk whats wrong

its stuck in “syncing items to icloud”

i have this problem also. My iphone 13 is updated, phones storage is ok. Icloud videos won’t load(most of them). This is annoying, I mean we are paying customers, 200T storage and I’d prefer it would work as promised but… do you guys have any update on this..?

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."

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.

Well i gotta update on this one.. so finally Apple engineers did their thing.. and all my videos that has this problem are gone… forever. Well i can still play them if i send them to some1 but basically they said theres nothing they can do about it… so like said this is very bad problem… I had like 4000 videos on Icloud. Now about 1000 on them works.. I’v had Iphone since iphone 4… so I’ll hope you guys can get your videos back, for me it didnt work… sorry my bad english, i hope you get my point from this..

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.

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.