[Fix] What to Do When Safari Won’t Play Videos on iPhone/PC

Updated Jun 01,2020 | by Micky

Q: "My iPhone Safari won't play videos and it just represents me a black screen when I try to play an online video. Does anyone know how to deal with it?" 

Safari is an exclusive browser for iOS that has a similar feature to Chrome and Firefox – to provide users with a platform to view web pages. Safari is renowned for its quickest rendering speed and automatic grammar and spelling checker which provides much convenience.

In spite of all those virtues mentioned above, sometimes, Safari won’t play videos iPhone/PC due to software and network issues. I can find many people are trying to find a solution on apple.com but the answers are always ambiguous…

In the following tutorial, we will mainly discuss why Safari won't play videos and how to fix it.

Hot Search: 4 Ways to Solve YouTube Not Playing on Windows 10 | How to Solve Windows Media Player Not Playing iPhone Videos

Outdated iOS Software - Try iOS 12?

What should I do when Safari won’t play YouTube and other videos on iPhone?

Besides the chance of a bad network connection that can be fixed by disconnecting and then reconnecting to Wi-Fi, it’s most likely that you haven’t upgraded iOS to the latest version which causes a video playback issue.

1.       In case of system crash, please make sure your iPhone is charged or connected to a power source.

2.       Connect your iPhone to Wi-Fi.

3.       Go to “Settings” and then, navigate to “General”, and “Software Update”

4.       Tap on “Download and Install” or “Install now”.

Too Many Junk Files on Safari - Are Your iPhone too Slow?

If the video cannot be played on Safari or it keeps buffering and stuttering, there might be too many cache and history cookies clogged up on Safari. You should clear Safari cache on iPhone to ensure smooth playback.

1.       Tap on “Settings” on the home screen.

2.       Go to “Safari” and then tap on “Clear History and Website Data”.

Only 2 steps, as you can see, Safari can run well again!

If you can't watch videos on Safari on a website that looks pretty old, it may not meet HTML 5 standard, so it requires Adobe Flash Player plug-in. Adobe Flash Player is usually a necessary plug-in on your computer, no matter it runs on Mac or on Windows if you want to have an online video streaming. Without this necessity, neither Safari nor Chrome will be able to play any videos. Check whether it has been installed or not and if negative, follow the steps below to fix it.

1.       Visit the site of Adobe Flash Player.

2.       Click on the download button and the file will go to the “Downloads” folder if you are using Safari.

3.       Open the folder and double-click on the installer file.

4.       A notification will pop up to ask you whether you really want to install Adobe Flash Player. Confirm it by clicking on “Open”.

5.       Just follow the given guidance until the final step and click on “Done” to finish it.

If you still can’t manage to watch videos on Safari online after trying all the methods above, you can consider downloading the video contents for an offline visual experience on Windows Media Player or on iPhone. IOTransfer iPhone transfer software just provides such a kind of convenience. Within only 2 steps, you can download a video from almost all mainstream video sites to PC and iPhone. 0 quality loss and ensured high speed come as its highlight!

Moreover, other features including video conversion, GIF making, and iPhone cleaning are also availabe for IOTransfer is such a functional tool.

Step 1 Connect Your iPhone to A PC on Windows

Install and launch IOTransfer, connect your iPhone to a computer based on Windows via a USB cable and wait till it’s recognized. If the notification “Trust This Computer” pops up on the device's screen, tap on “Trust”.

Step 2 Begin Video Download

Go to “VIDEOS” at the top of the home interface, in the opened windows, paste the video’s URL into the given filed beside “URL:”, preset an output folder, tick off the tiny box before “Automatically transfer the downloaded videos into your iOS device” and then, click on “Download” to get started. Within a short time, you can find the downloaded video in both the folder you previously set and in the video App on your iPhone

Bottom Line

That’s all about what to do when Safari won’t play videos iPhone and PC. Now, you can choose a proper solution from what provided above in terms of your own needs.

If one of the methods works, it might be caused by a hardware glitch. Go to the local Apple store for help!

Have any questions about online video download? Feel free to contact us!

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