VLC is a great way to transfer videos or other personal media to iPhone or iPad without using iTunes We love our iPhone or iPad, they're beautiful machines, but try to do something Apple thinks you shouldn't do and you run into a brick wall. We live in a walled garden designed by Apple. It's a very pretty walled garden, but it can be frustrating at times. The example today is the desire to transfer those videos you own outright from your computer to your iOS device. Apple's preferred method to transfer stuff to an iOS device (iPhone, iPad) is through iTunes. The iOS devices are not, technically speaking, cloud computing devices, because Apple designed them to tether to iTunes. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, doesn't let the iPhone or iPad simply appear as a mountable disk on a computer when connected via a USB cable, which would make it trivial to transfer files back and forth.