I made a video

This is a video I made on the way home from work the other day. Unfortunately I can’t work out how to make my server send the right MIME content type for it, so you’ll have to save it and load it with Quicktime. Anyone want to enlighten me? It’s an Apache 2 server on Linux. I tried adding mp4 to /etc/mime.types but it didn’t help.

Footnote: I have received several pieces of sarcastic email telling me that I am a stupid cow, and that I’m an idiot if I don’t know how to hack an Apache MIME type, and how can I possibly be described as a software engineer if I don’t know how to do that?

To all the people who sent me unpleasant email today as a result of this entry: I’d rather be someone who doesn’t know how to set up Apache than someone who doesn’t know how to be nice about someone not knowing something.

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8 Responses to I made a video

  1. rug says:

    How about renaming the file to *.mov?
    I may be wrong, and if I am please enlighten me.

  2. jasmine says:

    It’s not a .mov QuickTime file, it’s an ISO-standard MPEG-4 video file. It has the correct extension. I’d rather fix my server than break my pages :-)

  3. rug says:

    Okay, I used your movie on my local server and changed /etc/mime.types to include mp4 under video/mpeg. I accessed it through mozilla and it didn’t work, as in the file loaded from the browser and not the movie player.

    So, next I changed the file type to .mpg and tried. This time it worked, as in the movie player loaded the mpg file.

    So why not change the file type? What would go wrong if someone changes the file type instead of correcting the MIME lookup?

    Rug

    p.s: I’m just trying to learn something here. Hope you don’t mind.

  4. jasmine says:

    Well, for starters, my MPEG-4 video will play in any compliant MPEG-4 player, not just Quicktime Player. If I changed the filetype, whether the file would play would be dependant on whether the player had type recognition code and/or could crash if it guessed wrongly.

  5. Cédric says:

    I just opened your video with Quicktime Player, but i have a question…

    What kind of drugs do you have to take to see it right ?

  6. jasmine says:

    Oh, the usual. Did you not like it?

  7. Cédric says:

    I love the soundtrack.

    The video is nice too. ;-)

  8. Rachel Greenham says:

    Mmm. Apache maintains its own mimetypes. On Gentoo they’re in /etc/apache2/conf/mime.types

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