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iPhone camera roll video won't play

Some videos from a few months ago that I have saved to my camera roll won't play. What comes up is a little loading circle like it is trying to load the video but it never plays. I know for a fact that when the videos were saved, they worked. All of them are saved videos from snapchat, but some work and others don't. Does anyone know how I can solve this problem?


Thanks.

iPhone 5s, iOS 7.1.2

Posted on Apr 4, 2015 6:20 AM

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Posted on Mar 25, 2017 7:55 PM

I figured out something that works for me. This happened and it was super frustrating. Try editing the clip and shaving off a split second from the beginning/end and resave it as a new clip. The new clip played just fine!

96 replies

Feb 2, 2018 1:32 AM in response to 600k

Hi I read your comment and I have tried what you said my videos are still not working , only ones from this month or last month work , I have a video of my baby girls first words that I took last year and it worked fine for over a year I recorded her with my phone and it was fine I was always watching it and ever since I did the iOS 11.0.2 update on my phone two months ago all videos on my phone before December 2017 do not work just keeps saying download error and when I tried what you said it just keeps saying error please try again later do u have any other ideas what could fix this

Feb 23, 2017 4:37 PM in response to Mantics

Further adding to the mysterious issue, I just logged into iCloud on my mac (safari) and non of the said corrupted videos are on iCloud, my phone says they are, they are physically on my iPhone camera roll too.


I read on another forum about transferring the videos to a PC, I did this and the video file is 0kb in size! How did this happen? That's game, set match, the file is GONE unretrievable, doesn't even exisit anymore to be fixed in the first place! I'm so furious with Apple, this is ridiculous!


I spoke to Apple on the phone and the rep continually tried to blame Snapchat, I let him know it couldn't have been snapchats fault because the videos were playing and saved to my camera roll for a good week, it wasn't until I back up to iCloud that they no longer work. I'm devistated, to add insult to injury, I actually pay iCloud for extra storage.


Done with Apple!

Apr 29, 2017 12:37 AM in response to lesliebarnes8

Go to settings on your phone and shut off wifi. The phone provider's network should kick in (like the LTE network), and now try playing the videos. This has been happening to me off and on for years. If on your desktop computer, shut off wifi and plug in directly to the internet with an ethernet cable. Now try playing the videos. Hope this helps.

May 9, 2017 7:10 PM in response to Mantics

Me too. But it also says for certain videos that they "no longer exist" or that there's an error if I try to export or edit them. There's also and exclamation point in a circle in the right corner of the videos, some from Snapchat, others recorded straight from my camera. It seems like the videos aren't even there and I don't know what to do to save them.

Feb 23, 2017 7:28 PM in response to Ashjames

Connect to wifi and go to settings and see if it's pushing your photos for upload. What's happening is this... your photos have to reload from iCloud but if your not connected to wifi they won't upload automatically. So try that. Similar to when you update iOS. Plug it in and hook up to wifi and fetch the photos back. Let me know if that helps.

Mar 11, 2017 7:01 AM in response to SriniMurthy

This is exactly why I switched to Google Photos. They let you back everything up to the cloud and then delete on your device to make space. The way Apple handles cloud storage makes so little sense that it took me a while to understand. Wish I had never tried Apple cloud. All it did was create big blank patches in my photos and now won't play my videos. Between trying it out and switching back I know I've lost some things. At least from here on out I won't have to worry.


Hey Apple, when your phone only had 10 gb of space, how brilliant a plan is it to force people to keep everything on their phone, even if it is slightly compressed?

Feb 23, 2017 4:09 PM in response to Montanya

The link shows you how to restore/ back etc which is great and I've done this several times. It doesn't fix the issue. Am I missing something in your link? Please somebody have a fix, I've tried everything, duplicating doesn't work, won't let me share, somebody said they "deleted the video then airdropped it", that makes no sense to me. Care to elaborate on details of this "deleting and then air dropping" trick? I'm clutching at strings, there are over 140 saved snapchats from my trip to Europe :(

May 2, 2017 6:38 PM in response to Mantics

I had this problem when I updated my iPhone 5 to iso8. Fix for me was to select the video, but instead of playing it, there is a tab at the bottom of the screen, chose the icon 2nd from right (looks like music sheet) 3 horizontal lines. It should now show circle slowly filling up and saying downloading video. Depending on the size of the video shouldn't take more then a few minutes. Then your video should play normally. Hope this works for you.

iPhone camera roll video won't play

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