nPath Ltd.

A few of my clients have used flash videos in their pages. Out of the box this didn’t work on my server. It was fine in the development environment but once uploaded to production it was a no go. The video just never appeared.  It’s been a while since I learned this trick but it recently popped up again so I figure I sould blog it.

On a windows server running IIS flash . swf files that play .flv videos need to have a setting configured in IIS.

You must set MIME type to associate the .flv extention with video.

Specifically you set .flv=video/x-flv

So how do you do it?

For these instructions you need access to the server’s desktop to implement this tweek. A savy IT person with the right access can do this without remote desktop but I’ll keep it simple.

• Right click “My computer”
• Select “Manage” , microsoft management console will load with several snap-ins ready to go
• Expand the services and applications node
• Expand the Internet Infomation Servicess (IIS) Manager node
• Expand the Web Sites node
• Right click the web site you want to configure
• Select Properties. The site’s property sheets will appear.
• Click the HTTP Headers tab
• Click the Mime Types button
• Click the New button
• in the extention box type “flv”
• in the MIME Type box type “video/x-flv”
• Click OK, OK, OK

So what is MIME and why do we have to do this? Who cares, it works! Just kidding.  MIME types tell the browser what application to use with a certain file extention. In this case the server is telling the browser to use the flash player to handle flv files.

-edit on IIS7 the mimetype for flv is correct.