Desperate for help: Save online .mov videos to iPhone camera roll?

huckdunsany · 05-10-2012, 10:25 AM

Hi folks,

I'm in a real bind and trying to help my wife and her mom. They have some videos that my Mother-in-law wants to have stored on her iPhone 4. She has never synced the phone with a computer, only with iCloud from when she bought it. The videos are of her husband who recently passed away, and it would be really tremendous for her to have these handy to view whenever she needs...

I've put the videos into my MobileMe iDisk, and can confirm that they play just fine on my personal iPhone 4 when I access the shared URL. However, I cannot figure out how to save them to the camera roll of the phone, which is essential for my MIL since she's both non-tech-savvy and has limited Wi-Fi access.

What's the trick that I'm missing here? Any help would be really, really appreciated!

fracai · 05-10-2012, 11:25 AM

I don't think you can manually move items into the Camera Roll, that's for items taken by the camera. Instead, you want to get them into Movies, and I think your best bet is to put them in DropBox. Even if you can't then directly move them to Movies, from the DropBox app, you can mark them as favorites and they'll be cached in the DropBox app.

I'm sure there are other ways.

huckdunsany · 05-10-2012, 11:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fracai


	I don't think you can manually move items into the Camera Roll, that's for items taken by the camera. Instead, you want to get them into Movies, and I think your best bet is to put them in DropBox. Even if you can't then directly move them to Movies, from the DropBox app, you can mark them as favorites and they'll be cached in the DropBox app. I'm sure there are other ways.

Thanks for the suggestion! I think I've just found an option that's working: there's a free app called "Video Downloader Pro Lite" - I just tested it with one of the videos on my iDisk and (even over 3G!) it downloaded and stored it in the camera roll with no trouble. I'm going to suggest to my wife that she try that while she's visiting her mom this weekend, since it's working for me.

Thanks again for the help!

NaOH · 05-10-2012, 11:32 AM

I don't believe there's a built-in way to do what you'd like. One approach would be to see if there are any apps which can help, though my guess is that this would involve a convoluted set of actions for your mother-in law (visit a page in Safari, copy the link, open the third-party app, paste the link in the appropriate spot, save the movie, then repeat for other movies).

Perhaps easiest would be if you create a free YouTube account and upload the movies. You could then give her links to the individual movies (or your YouTube page where they all exist). Opening the link(s) from an email would launch her YouTube app, and in there she could add them to her YouTube favorites with just a couple taps (perhaps with your help, but it's easy to do).

05-10-2012, 10:25 AM	#1
huckdunsany Prospect Join Date: Oct 2004 Posts: 18	Desperate for help: Save online .mov videos to iPhone camera roll? Hi folks, I'm in a real bind and trying to help my wife and her mom. They have some videos that my Mother-in-law wants to have stored on her iPhone 4. She has never synced the phone with a computer, only with iCloud from when she bought it. The videos are of her husband who recently passed away, and it would be really tremendous for her to have these handy to view whenever she needs... I've put the videos into my MobileMe iDisk, and can confirm that they play just fine on my personal iPhone 4 when I access the shared URL. However, I cannot figure out how to save them to the camera roll of the phone, which is essential for my MIL since she's both non-tech-savvy and has limited Wi-Fi access. What's the trick that I'm missing here? Any help would be really, really appreciated!

05-10-2012, 11:25 AM	#2
fracai MVP Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 2,013	I don't think you can manually move items into the Camera Roll, that's for items taken by the camera. Instead, you want to get them into Movies, and I think your best bet is to put them in DropBox. Even if you can't then directly move them to Movies, from the DropBox app, you can mark them as favorites and they'll be cached in the DropBox app. I'm sure there are other ways.
$fracai is offline$

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05-10-2012, 11:32 AM	#4
NaOH Hall of Famer Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 3,649	I don't believe there's a built-in way to do what you'd like. One approach would be to see if there are any apps which can help, though my guess is that this would involve a convoluted set of actions for your mother-in law (visit a page in Safari, copy the link, open the third-party app, paste the link in the appropriate spot, save the movie, then repeat for other movies). Perhaps easiest would be if you create a free YouTube account and upload the movies. You could then give her links to the individual movies (or your YouTube page where they all exist). Opening the link(s) from an email would launch her YouTube app, and in there she could add them to her YouTube favorites with just a couple taps (perhaps with your help, but it's easy to do).