HTML5 video tag

[justbringit85]

Here is the issue:

GoDaddy will not allow me to playback any uploaded videos for the HTML5 video tag. So I looked up the issue and was told to edit the htaccess file to add the following:

AddType video/ogg.ogv
AddType video/mp4.mp4
AddType video/webm.webm

After adding those, it still won't work. The file is in the root directory and I tried moving it around to see if that would help, but no luck. Any suggestions?

The video does work on my computer on my wamp server, so the video is fine and everything is coded properly.

[rtrethewey]

Your .htaccess code seems to be malformed. Try:

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Then use a server response checker to make sure that the server is sending the indicated MIME types when you try to access such files so you can be sure this isn't the cause of any problems.

[justbringit85]

When I ran the checker this is what it told me. I also made the changes to the htaccess file. Still same issue.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:42:02 GMT

[rtrethewey]

The problem is that you're running on a Microsoft IIs server and this code is for Apache-based servers. While there are ways to use .htaccess on Microsoft IIs servers, I doubt GoDaddy supports such a solution on shared hosting accounts. You might request GoDaddy change their servers to support these file types directly, but I wouldn't expect them to agree.

There might be a way to add some ASP code to your pages to handle this automatically like .htaccess does on Apache servers, but the only solution I can think of would be to write a PHP script that would fetch the media file, send the correct MIME type header for you, and then echo the file contents. Then you'd set your HTML <video> tags to point to this script with a query string that would include the actual file name. It would be a kludge, but it would probably work. Sorry I can't be of more help. Good luck!

[justbringit85]

I figured it out finally. I had to set up a linux based hosting account, then upload the .htaccess file with the mime types. It works! I guess windows hosting account won't work with the HTML5 video tag. Thanks for your help, you put me in the right direction.

[rtrethewey]

It's not that the tag won't work with a IIs server, it's just that the server has to be properly configured to use the proper MIME-type headers for these particular kinds of video files. But I'm glad you got it sorted. Good luck!