Your New iPhone 18 Pro Videos Will Not Play on Windows - Here Is the Free Fix

The iPhone 18 Pro reaches buyers on 18 September, and the first thing a lot of them will discover is that Windows will not open the videos it makes.

You copy the file across, double-click it, and get a black window, a silent player or an error about a missing codec.

Nothing is wrong with your phone, your cable or your PC.

Windows simply never shipped the decoder your new camera records with.

What Your New iPhone Actually Records

Apple's own iPhone 18 Pro specifications list four video formats and three photo formats, and the ones the camera reaches for by default are the two Windows struggles with most.

Here is what comes out of the phone, and what a stock Windows 11 PC does with each one.

The bottom two rows are new territory for most people, and they are covered further down. The top four are where nearly everybody gets stuck.

Why Windows Shows You Nothing

HEVC is patented, and the licensing is expensive enough that Microsoft never built free decoding into Windows the way it did for the older H.264.

You may have read that recent versions of Windows 11 include HEVC anyway. That is not quite true - whether it works without help depends on your graphics chip and on what your PC maker chose to license, which is why the same file plays on one laptop and not on another.

So it is worth knowing which side of that line your machine falls on before you assume the file is broken.

The Free Fix, In About Two Minutes

Before installing anything, you can settle the question in a few seconds by dropping one of the files into our browser-based HEVC player, which plays the file locally without uploading it anywhere.

If it plays there and not in Windows, the decoder is the whole problem. Here is how to fix it properly.

• Open the free HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer page and follow it through to the Microsoft Store.
• Install it. There is no setup wizard and nothing to configure - it registers itself with Windows.
• Double-click your video again. It plays, thumbnails appear in File Explorer, and the Photos app stops refusing them.

The download is around 10MB and it takes effect immediately, with no restart.

If you would rather not add anything to Windows itself, VLC Media Player carries its own HEVC decoder and opens the files without touching your system at all. The trade-off is that only VLC gains the ability - File Explorer thumbnails and the Photos app stay blank.

The Setting That Stops It Happening Again

If most of your footage ends up on a Windows PC anyway, you can tell the phone to stop using the efficient formats altogether.

Go to Settings > Camera > Formats and switch from High Efficiency to Most Compatible. From then on the camera records H.264 video and JPEG photos, both of which Windows has opened without help for well over a decade.

The cost is size. The same clip takes noticeably more space, which is why Apple ships the phone the other way round in the first place.

Your Photos Have the Same Problem

The photo half of this is HEIC, and it is more annoying than the video half because the failure is quieter - the files copy across perfectly and then sit in the folder as blank grey rectangles with no thumbnail.

CopyTrans HEIC is the simplest answer. It is free, it does not need a Microsoft Store account, and it teaches File Explorer to show HEIC thumbnails and previews the way it does for JPEGs.

It also adds a right-click option to convert to JPG, in batches, keeping the original date and camera information intact.

The Formats No Free Decoder Opens

ProRes and ProRes RAW are a different matter, and honesty is more useful here than a workaround. There is no free Windows decoder for them, and the practical routes are a paid video editor or converting the footage on a Mac first.

They are also enormous. Apple's own guidance puts ProRes files at up to thirty times the size of the equivalent HEVC, which is why the phone will only record the highest settings straight to an external drive rather than to its own storage.

Spatial video is the other one worth knowing about. It copies to Windows and plays, but as an ordinary flat clip - the depth information needs a headset to mean anything.

Quick questions

One small free download turns every iPhone video on your drive back into something you can watch.

If you want the longer reference covering HEVC, HEIC and HEIF together, our guide to opening HEVC, HEIC and HEIF files on Windows goes through every case.

Download HEVC Video Extensions and try one of your files again, or tell us how you got on if your PC was one of the ones that played them all along.