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Tap Add. You can bring films in from Files, which covers iCloud Drive and anything plugged into the phone such as a USB drive or an SD reader, and you can bring them in from your Photos library. You can pick several at once.

CineDrive copies each file into its own storage rather than linking to it. That uses space on the phone, but it means the film still plays after you unplug the drive or tidy up the original.

Two things have to be true for picture on the car's screen: the car must be parked, and the car maker must have turned on CarPlay's video support.

The parked rule is Apple's, and CineDrive will not show video to a moving car. The second one is out of everyone's hands but the car maker's: Apple added the video category in iOS 27 and each manufacturer has to enable it. At the time of writing none has publicly shipped it. Until your car does, CineDrive plays the film as audio and shows Now Playing, which is the intended fallback rather than a fault.

In practice, whatever you have. Films the iPhone can already play, such as MP4 and MOV with H.264 or HEVC video, are used as they are.

Anything else, including MKV, AVI and WebM, is converted once when you add it. A progress ring shows the work, and it only happens the first time. If a conversion fails you can retry it.

Two reasons. The file is copied into the app, which takes as long as copying a large file normally does, and a film that needs converting is converted at that point.

Where only the container is wrong, the conversion is a repackage and finishes in seconds. Where the video or audio itself has to be re-encoded it takes longer, and it is done once rather than every time you play.

Hiding a film removes it from the library grid, from search, from Continue watching and from every CarPlay list. It never appears on the car's screen. While one plays, the Lock Screen and the car show “Private film” with no artwork.

The Hidden screen opens with Face ID, falling back to your device passcode, and locks again as soon as you leave the app. Hiding a film needs no authentication; getting back into the Hidden screen does. If your phone has no passcode set, the screen stays locked and tells you so.

No, deliberately. Films are excluded from your iCloud backup so they do not consume your storage quota, since you can re-import them from the original files.

That means if you delete the app or reset the phone, the films in CineDrive go with it. Keep the original files somewhere you can get at them.

The app is free. Your first three films play with everything else working, so you can see what your own car does before paying anything.

After that, a single purchase called CineDrive Full removes the limit permanently. It is $4.99 in the United States, and Apple sets the matching price elsewhere. It is a one-time purchase, not a subscription: nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel.

The first three you added, counting any you have hidden. Films past that point stay in your library with a lock on them and open the unlock sheet when tapped.

Nothing is deleted and nothing leaves your folder. If you buy the unlock later, everything that was locked simply plays.

Open Settings inside CineDrive and tap Restore Purchases. The purchase belongs to your Apple Account rather than to a CineDrive account, since there is no such thing, so it comes back on any device signed in to the same Apple Account.

Family Sharing is turned on, so people in your Family Sharing group can use the purchase too.

Apple handles refunds, not us, because Apple takes the payment. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com.

If the reason is that video does not appear on your car's screen, please read the question above about that first. It usually means your car maker has not enabled CarPlay video yet, which is why the app lets you try three films for free before you buy.

No. It makes no network requests at all. There is no account, and nothing is fetched from anywhere, not even artwork. Everything happens on the phone. The privacy policy says the same thing at more length.

No. CineDrive plays film files you already have. It is not a streaming client, it does not download anything, and it cannot open copy-protected files from a subscription service.

On the phone, alongside the film. Stop watching in the car and the film is waiting at the same point on your phone, and the other way round. Continue shows the ones you are part-way through.

Email [email protected]. Tell us the film's file name, where it came from, and what the car was doing at the time if it is a CarPlay question. Since the app sends us nothing, your description is all we have to go on.