iPhone camera roll video won't play

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?

I believe I found a solution to this.

Go to your camera roll, then go to the video that you want to play, at the bottom left press the arrow button, than hit duplicate, once duplicated you will have two of the same video, go to the new video and play it (it should work) and once I played the new video both the original and new video worked. Not sure if this will work for everyone but now all my videos are working. Hope this helped.

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.

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!

This happened to me many times, I found out that many things like snapchat and Instagram files are very odd formats. For example, Instagram used to use their own file type called .inst . When i captured them with an app, my phone was only able to play them for 6-7 days after this. The phone only installs a temporary file reader from the app which is deleted in approximately a week. I would do one of two things;

#1: Back the files up to your cloud storage and pull them down onto an iPad or Mac. They will have a temporary reader from the file type, just like the primary device, thus allowing you to repeatedly do this every time you want to view these files.

#2: Find a third party file reader after you find the file type, you can do this by uploading to google drive and seeing the .file type or viewing your devices storage on your computer. Then locate an app that will read and/or play this file type.

Thats all I've got.

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.

Hey Mantics,

This doesn't answer your question but I would recommend backing up the content just be safe. If the videos are not that important then feel free to disregard this. Just so we know, if you import the videos to a computer do the play normally?

I've got an iPhone 5s running iOS 8.3 and I have the same issue. I've restored my iPhone multiple times first through iCloud (which took about a day for each restore) and iTunes. I looked through the Camera Roll as it was restoring from iCloud noticing that not all of the videos had loaded and hoped they would load later, but they never did! So I tried my iTunes backups (I had to go into Time Machine several times to see if I could salvage any of the videos) and so far nothing! By using backup extraction tools and by trying to export the videos to my computer, it seems like iTunes never actually backed up those videos for some very odd reason. It's also a similar situation with me; most of the videos are Snapchat videos. All 205 of my videos in my Camera Roll showed up when I used my iTunes backups, but only 52 of them play! Basically I'm missing 75% of my videos!!!!! I seriously hope this is an issue Apple can fix because I've otherwise lost a LOT of recorded memories!

Seems like now I can't even trust iTunes or iCloud to properly back up my stuff. Absolutely ridiculous!

Try this:

On your cell phone turn off wifi (and just use your carrier's network). Wifi sometimes interferes with watching your videos.

If on your computer, shut off wifi and plug directly into the internet with an ethernet cord.

Let me know if shutting off wifi helps.

Click on the video then click on the icon that's on the bottom left that looks like a square with an arrow and it should be there. But Good Luck! I've tried everything and couldn't resolve this issue. My videos still won't play :(

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!

I just started having the same problem since the latest update some of my videos play fine and the others just have the loading circle I've rebooted and recovered my phone, disabled icloud photos and enabled it nothing is working does anyone know how to fix this?

Its ridiculous, when you want to delete something from the iCloud or just the local device, there is no concept of a cloud back up that isolates images from the cloud to the ones on the device. So if you delete locally, there is no option but to accept "delete from cloud", there is no second option button than the "cancel". What the **** are they trying to help with?

I "backed" up my iPhone because there was a hardware problem, and when I restored it to my new device, my own ******* videos won't play, they were supposed to be local, it wasn't a cloud backup. If these guys can't solve problems, why do they create issues?! What the **** do I do about my old videos, they were priceless!

Anyone hace any updates to this issue? My partner had the same problem a few months ago and even went to the apple store who advised him to backup and then download again from iClouds which I can see some of you have done!

Now I have the same issue! At first I thought it's because I selected "Optimise iPhone storage" under Settings > icloud > Photos as I was running out of data on my phone but after checking my partners phone he had the "download and keep original" which is the other option in this settings but we both have the same issue!

I only have 60 videos which the longest would be around minute or just a little over and not many pictures so I don't know why it's happening! We both upgraded software at the same time and have both iPhone 5 so don't understand why my videos would not be working months later after my partners!

Apple lease find a fix!?