Unable to play iPhone 12 MOV videos on Apple TV

I took several videos on my iPhone - MOV - when I tried to play on AppleTV it cannot play them - error. Yet I have other movies I did with same phone etc and works well. I changed the ending to MP4 but no good - what do I need to do


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iPhone 12, iOS 18

Posted on May 20, 2025 2:27 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 29, 2025 8:47 PM

The MOV video is probably encoded with H.265 (HEVC) codec, which is not supported by your Apple TV. You can play it with Infuse, or convert the video to H.264, HandBrake can do it. You can also use cisdem video converter, it provides Apple TV output profile.

6 replies

May 21, 2025 12:45 AM in response to Petra01

mov and the likes are containers if they will play is what codec the media in the container is using

(if you want to know more about the differences What is the difference?: Codecs and containers)


if the codec is not something that the appletv app supports then you can do the following


  1. use vlc player it's free and play most codecs around
  2. use the free app called handbrake to convert the media to formats supported by appletv (box/app/whatever)

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Unable to play iPhone 12 MOV videos on Apple TV

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