Some time ago I have to download a lot of photos, including several videos, from my iPhone to my WinXP PC. The copy took 20-30 minutes, but finished without any errors. This weekend I had some spare time to sort the photos and suddenly realized that several videos have zero size. Fortunately, I had no time for clean up the photo library on the iPhone during this period and the originals survived. However, copying the files one per time lead to the same effect – Windows Explorer silently failed after 1-2 minutes of trying, leaving the empty video in the target folder. Looks like the limit is around 200Mb…
The workaround is simple – it appears that iTunes leaves the last full backup on the hard drive (on WinXP it is under “C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\”), and this backup contains plain copies of all photos and videos from the device. All files have computer-generated names (even w/o extension), so there is no immediate way to determine which file contains the video that you need. The simplest option will be to sort those files by size, copy the largest ones to another folder, appendthem “.mov” extension and watch them one by one in some video player.
P.S. This issue was first mentioned on Apple forums 1.5 years ago, even before the release of iPhone 4, but not fixed yet.
