MP4 downloading as text file in browser - servermimetype issue?

I've loaded several MP4 videos on one of my customer's websites hosted by
Verio.

Problem occurs when clicking on the link to the files, browsers on both PC and
Mac platforms download the files as text files instead of handing them on to a
mediaplayer.

The files play fine if you download the textfiles and then rename the
extension to .mp4, and they were originally transferred to the web server as
binary files, so it's not like they were loaded in ASCI and converted to text
at that time.

The files also play fine on both PC and Macs when sent on by email, so it's
not the files themselves.

As I understand it, the problem here is most likely that the server admin has
not set the correct MIME types for .mp4 media, and due to this the browsers
trying to load the linked file are told it's a text file not a video MP4 file.

Can anybody confirm this? Verio customer support asser that there's no problem
playing MP4s form the server in question, and yet I appear to have three that
don't work, all bog standard MP4 files that play fine when downloaded and
renamed to their proper extension.

Many thanks for any help,

Cheers,
Peter

"threechordwonder" <webforumsuser (AT) macromedia (DOT) com> wrote

I've loaded several MP4 videos on one of my customer's websites hosted by
Verio.

Problem occurs when clicking on the link to the files, browsers on both
PC and
Mac platforms download the files as text files instead of handing them on
to a
mediaplayer.

it is most likely that their PC or MAC doesn't know what to do with a mp4
extension, and just tries to load it in the browser.

For example my own PC doens't know what to do with a file with the extension
..mp4.

As I understand it, the problem here is most likely that the server admin
has
not set the correct MIME types for .mp4 media, and due to this the
browsers
trying to load the linked file are told it's a text file not a video MP4
file.

Won't matter what the server does, is the PC doesn't know what it is, then
it won't work.

Following up on my own question here, in case it's useful to anybody else
searching the forums with a similar problem.

The problem is fixed - I spoke to a more helpful support person at the ISP,
and it turns out that indeed there was no mime.type set on the Unix server this
site is hosted on, and that was the reason that browsers (on whatever platform
and regardless of whether there was an MP4 capable player installed on the same
machine) were opening the MP4 files as plain text in the browser window instead
of downloading the file to the hard drive.

As a quick workaround while waiting for the ISP's development team to consider
including MP4 as a standard format in the server mimetype setup, the support
person suggested setting up a local .htaccess file (plain text file) which acts
much as a mimetype setup would - i.e. tiny bit of code that tells the browsers
visiting that files with an .mp4 extension are MP4 video files and to download
them to the hard drive.

Setting up and adding that text file easy and fixed the issue.

Warning - I think this fix is particular to Unix servers. It may or may not
work on Windows servers.

P.S. whether machines can play the MP4 format video or not is not relevant to
what the browser does; the issue was getting the file downloaded to the machine
in the first place. After that, the user may or may not be able to play it
depending on whether they have a MP4 capable media player or not.