Comments on: quick tip: open web video and mime types

By: Noccy

Noccy — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:40:49 +0000

I found your page as I was looking for info on how to stream OGG video from VLC. It works between clients, but when streaming to a container it doesn’t. The reason is that VLC is sending out the application/octet-stream content type, which made me think; why doesn’t the tag has a type attribute for overriding content type? Would make sense :)

By: Sam Morris

Sam Morris — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:55:53 +0000

Frank Hecker: Never mind, I see you said yourself that video/ogg worked with Firefox’s implementation. :)

By: Christopher Blizzard

Christopher Blizzard — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:04:29 +0000

@Livio – file extensions don’t have anything to do with what’s being served up. HTML can come in any form with any extension. Same with images, video, audio, etc. Some browsers sniff more than others, but that often leads to incorrect configurations by servers and clients and more compatibility problems down the road.

By: Ian M

Ian M — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:33:14 +0000

Are these being made as defaults in the current version of Apache?

By: Livio

Livio — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:25:18 +0000

Most web servers are likely to return the mime type as “text/plain” which Mozilla will not show as video.

And this is the badness of Mozilla products. It should confrontate extension with local system to check whether it is openable – or not.

Also, Mozilla products, when a link clicked, don’t propose opening file inside, they always propose external programs, even when the file is only an image.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:49:36 +0000

James Henridge: You’re right, I was misremembering. Per section 10.3 of RFC 5334 the .ogg extension should indeed map to audio/ogg, for backwards compatibility with existing .ogg audio files.

Sam Morris: I’m not sure what you mean by “Will video/ogg work?” It works fine in Firefox 3.0 in terms of downloading Ogg Theora files; for my personal web server .ogv gets mapped to video/ogg, and then my copy of Firefox is configured to launch VLC for video/ogg to view the files.

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:10:53 +0000

.ogg should be audio/ogg according to Xiph.org — not application/ogg.

By: Sam Morris

Sam Morris — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:35 +0000

Will video/ogg work? I ask since it’s the default entry for .ogv in Debian’s /etc/mime.types.

By: video tag, Dreamhost and Firefox 3.5 | On the blink

video tag, Dreamhost and Firefox 3.5 | On the blink — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:35:22 +0000

[...] copy-pasting a blog post from blizzard, as we had a conversation on IRC about using the video tag on Firefox and Dreamhost hosting (due a [...]

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:32:26 +0000

I think recommended practice is now per RFC 5334, i.e., to use video/ogg and .ogv, audio/ogg and .oga, and application/ogg and .ogg/.ogx. Using video/ogg seems to work fine with Firefox and the video tag, this is what I did at http://hecker.org/mozilla/hfoss09

See also Silvia Pfeiffer’s blog post at http://blog.gingertech.net/2008/09/05/new-ogg-mime-types-ratified/