Having your favorite videos available while using AirPlane mode can make your travels a lot smoother – especially when traveling with kids.

Our favorite travel accessories for iPads:

ProCase: https://amzn.to/48JNLye

AirPods: https://amzn.to/41Koulr

Power Bank: https://amzn.to/41LTDF8

How to download videos on your iPad or iPhone

If you’ve traveled with kids you know they get bored easily and can be a handful on a long flight. I recently did a long trip with my son and I knew he was going to need some entertainment while we’re on AirPlane mode without a Wi-Fi connection. Before the trip, I downloaded a bunch of his favorite shows and videos on my Mac and transferred them to our iPad. It was one of the best travel preparations I’ve ever done and I highly recommend all parents to do this if you’re traveling with kids.

Step 1 – Download videos to your computer

If you’re mainly using streaming services to watch videos you’re better off checking your app to see if there’s an option to download episodes to watch them offline. This tutorial works best for videos you’re able to download directly on your computer – whether it’s home videos or something downloaded from the internet.

Step 2 – Transfer videos to your iPad or iPhone

The process of getting videos from your computer to your iPhone or iPad is not the most intuitive and it took me a minute to figure out how to get my videos to our iPad.

Once you have all your videos on your computer you’ll want to move them under

Movies -> TV -> Media -> Automatically Add to TV.

If you don’t see the Movies folder in your Finder sidebar you can add it there by opening your Finder settings and under “Sidebar” checking the option for Movies.

After you move your videos to the folder mentioned above, plug in your iPad or iPhone and select it on the Finder sidebar. Navigate to “Movies” and check the box that says “Sync movies onto iPad”. Pick the videos you want to be transferred and click “Apply”.

After this, you can open the TV app on your iPad or iPhone and navigate to “Home Videos” where you’ll find all your downloaded videos, available for watching even when you don’t have wifi or cellular connection.

There you have it. It’s a simple process but has a couple of tricky steps like finding the right folder to place your videos in, as well as finding the videos on your iPad. You’d think they go to the Photos app but instead you’ll find them in the TV app, which took me a while to get used to.

Hope that was helpful. Make sure to share this with your traveling friends and sign up to our newsletter below to get more similar tips to your inbox.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. This helps us continue to create guides like this for our audience.