Air 3S, Mavic 4Pro & Apple Computers

alfo2010 · 2025-07-26T21:22:31-0400

This message requesting help from anyone living in the Nanaimo BC area. I purchased a Mavic 4 Pro when they were released here in Canada. Everything worked awesome until twelve days ago when I returned home the video played back but was choppy/glitchy and my initial thought was that my SD had issues but when I did a recording on the second SD card that DJI recommended a Lexar Silver Plus the same issue occurred. I then tried recording on the drone hard drive directly to my MacBook Pro Max (64GB ram), same issue. I thought that maybe the problem was the gimbal and checked it out, it was fine. After doing everything to I could to identify the issue, so I contacted DJI and spoke to a tech and we went through testing the drone checking all the setting etc. The tech passed me on to the supervisor and after a conversation he requested that I send the drone to DJI, and I did. I usually have a backup drone, but I sold it to friend that lost his Mini and wanted to buy my Mini 4 so I sold it to him. So, I purchased a Mavic 3S as a backup drone. The day after I purchased the drone I went out and did a shoot and came home and transferred the files to my Mac, same issue. I’ve had two conversations with Apple and their screen viewing and they are not sure what the problem is, but I’ll get back to them on Monday. The videos will not play back without being choppy/glitchy on my two 2024 MacBook M3’s, Mac Mini, two new Apple Air’s M4 chips no matter what player platform I use. I went to a friends place to do a test on his one-year-old Windows 11 PC and his computer would not recognize a direct feed from my drone or my hard drive formatted in exFAT that is supposed to be compatible with a PC. He formatted a small hard drive on his PC and again it came up with a code error. At this point DJI says they have done all the testing they can do and there is nothing wrong with the drone and they want to return it to me. If there is someone in the Nanaimo BC area I would really appreciate if you can loan me a two- or three-minute recoding on a SD card with a recording from a DJI drone to test if it will play back on an Apple computer. Thanks Al

UAV Ernst · 2025-07-27T01:19:03-0400

Hello from Comox, Al. Have you put the video file directly on the SSD and tried playing it on several programmes that will play your video files on one of your Macs? Could it be a slower connection from an adapter for the little SD card, a not so fast USB cable, etc? I also found that some video applications have smoother playback than others.