For PC users who have just shot a lot of photos or videos with your newly purchased iPhone, sometimes, you may come the idea to transfer the recorded iPhone video to your PC desktop or laptop to make more space for the iPhone. When you try to play the iPhone video on PC with the default media player app – Windows Media Player, you may be disappointed to find that Windows Media Player don’t under the format and you just get the following error message:
“Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."
Why fail to play iPhone video with Windows Media Player?
To answer this question, we should be figure out what the specific file formats shot with iPhone video and the supported file formats by Windows Media Player.
iPhone video recorded file format
Although iPhone supports to play more file types, however, when recording videos on the iPhone, the files are saved as H.264 QuickTime files. There use the MOV file format.
Supported file formats by Windows Media Player
From Microsoft’s official page, we find that only Windows Media Player 12 has included native playback support for QuickTime Movie file(.mov). However, it also states clearly that only QuickTime files version 2.0 or earlier can be played in Windows Media Player. Later versions of QuickTime require the proprietary Apple QuickTime Player.
Above information shows that Windows Media Player only works for the QuickTime files 2.0 or earlier, obviously, the H.264 QuickTime MOV file shot with iPhone doesn’t belong to that version.
Solutions to fix Windows Media Player not play iPhone Video
To get iPhone video played on Windows Media Player, you can either choose to install the proprietary Apple QuickTime Player on your Windows PC or use a third-party video conversion app such as Pavtube Video Converter to transcode iPhone video to Windows Media Player native playback video file formats such as AVI, ASF, WMV.
The program has full importing support for all the 4K/2K/HD/SD video shot with iPhone video. Thanks to its batch conversion mode, you can load multiple iPhone video into the application for conversion at one time.
Related article: Watch MP4 on Windows Media Player | Play MKV with Windows Media Player | Play AVI with Windows Media Player
Adjust output profile parameters
To get better output video and audio quality, you can flexibly adjust output profile parameters such as video codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc according to your own preference.
Pavtube Video Converter has perfect compatibility with Windows 10/8.1/8/7. The program is pretty simple to use, any one can learn to use it in minutes. What’s more, it supports to produce high quality results, you can’t find any difference between the result video and the source video.
Step by Step to Convert iPhone Video for Windows Media Player Viewing
Step 1: Import iPhone video files to this converter.
Install and run this smart app. Then you have two ways to import iPhone video files. Directly drag oneiPhone video file to this app or go to “Add File”.
Step 2: Choose Windows Media Player supported format.
Click the “Format” drop-down button to select Windows Media Player more compatible format: To convert iPhone video to Windows Media Player video format, select WMV, AVI, or ASF from the “Format > Video” Category;To convert iPhone video to WMP audio format, select WMA, MP3, or WAV from the “Format > Audio” Category; To convert iPhone video to WMP video format without quality loss, select HD AVI or HD WMV from the “HD Video” Category.
Tips: Click the “Setting …” button to adjust the video or audio quality, codec, bitrates, file size, audio volume, audio channel and etc.
Step 3: Edit iPhone video.(Optional)
The smart WMP video converter additionally offers some useful edit functions to enhance your video. Click the Edit button to trim/crop/watermark/split/merge/apply effect to iPhone video.
Step 4: Start to convert iPhone video to Windows Media Player.
Now, you need to hit “Convert” to convert iPhone video to Windows Media Player supported format. When the conversion is done, click “Open” to locate the converted WMV file on your laptop or computer. At this time, you can drag these WMV output files to WMP or use your windows your windows browser to navigate to the converted file and double click to run the video.
