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A QuickTime logo instead of a video

2009/05/17

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced the video showing what our Front Row DVDPedia plugin looks like. The original video was too big to be watched on a mobile device and loaded right away, wasting precious bandwidth.

While playing around with QuickTime pro, I found the solution I was looking for. QuickTime can export various versions of a movie and create a script that serves the most appropriate one depending on the bandwidth available and the device used to request the media. Plus, it gives you a “click to play” link for free !

A couple of minutes later, everything was working correctly on my laptop. Unfortunately, once the website was deployed on our web server, it did not work as I expected. A big QuickTime logo was displayed where I was expecting the video. The funny thing is that it worked on our staging server, but not on the production server. It obviously had something to do with the web server’s configuration but a quick look at Apache’s logs showed nothing conclusive.

If this happens to you, make sure you have the right mime types activated in Apache. Our web server sent the correct mime types for the .mov file we originally had but it did not know what to do with the .m4v and .3gp files generated by QuickTime.

If you don’t have access to Apache’s configuration file, you can use a htaccess file. The syntax looks like this:

# Correct Mime Types for delivery of QuickTime movies
AddType video/x-m4v m4v
AddType video/3gpp 3gp

Put the htaccess file at the root of your website and you should be good to go !

Of course, this is explained in detail on Apple’s website but it’s not easy to find.