How to Sync Movies to Your iPad

Copy them to your iPad with or without iTunes

Young kid watching a movie on an iPad

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by Sam Costello
Sam Costello has been writing about tech since 2000. His writing has appeared in publications such as CNN.com, PC World, InfoWord, and many others.
Updated April 05, 2019

If you have movies spread about between iTunes and your iPad, it's best to keep them in sync. When you sync your iPad with your computer, movies from your iTunes library will copy to your iPad, and videos on your iPad will be backed up to iTunes.

Along with being a great music player, ebook reader, and gaming devices, the iPad is a great mobile video player. Whether it's movies or TV shows, the iPad's big, beautiful screen makes watching videos a joy.

Directions

To copy movies and TV shows to your iPad, enable the Sync Movies option in iTunes.

  1. Attach your iPad to your computer.

  2. Open your iPad from within iTunes by clicking the icon at the top of the program, just below the menu items.

  3. Select Movies from the left pane of iTunes.

  4. Put a check in the box next to Sync Movies. To copy specific videos from iTunes to your iPad, select them manually, else use the Automatically include option to select all your videos at once.

  5. Use the Apply button in iTunes to update and sync movies to your iPad.

You can make similar changes to the TV Shows section of iTunes to sync shows.

  1. Open the TV Shows area of iTunes.

  2. Check the box next to Sync TV Shows.

  3. Pick which shows and/or seasons to sync to your iPad or use the checkbox at the top of that screen to sync all of them.

  4. Sync the TV shows to the iPad with the Apply button at the bottom of iTunes.

Sync Without iTunes

If iTunes is too confusing or you'd rather not attempt to sync your iPad for fear of losing music or videos, you can use a third-party program like Syncios. It's free and lets you manually copy over specific movies and other videos that you want to store on your iPad.

Movies and TV shows you sync with Syncios will go on your iPad in much the same way they copy over when using iTunes, but you don't have to even open iTunes to use this program.

  1. Go to the Media tab on the left of the Syncios program.

  2. Choose Videos on the right, under the Video section.

  3. Use the Add button at the top of Syncios to choose a video file or folder of multiple videos.

  4. Click Open or OK to send the video(s) to your iPad.