So Apple thought that using the file extension ‘m4v’ would be a good idea, probably because they could then assign it to iTunes and video made for the iPod would ‘do the right thing’ in the eyes of Apple. Of course, there are a few problems…
On the Videoblogging list We sometimes see people who do things like just rename the ‘m4v’ to ‘mov’ and hope that will work. Often they do this because they assume they are making a QuickTime movie, or their server is sending the file as text/plain instead of video/mp4. (Don’t ge me started on the “QuickTime is a container format!” discussion…)
The fix? Well, you should be able to just rename the file extension from ‘m4v’ to ‘mp4’ but if you can add the mime-type to your server, you might as well just do that. I wonder if Apple has done anything in regards to making this mime-type issue known, maybe they could let those Apache folks know about it so they can roll it into the next version of mime.types…
Here is part of what I’ve got in my .htaccess file for video serving:
AddType video/mp4 .mp4 .m4v AddType video/mpeg .mpeg .mpg AddType video/quicktime .mov
Hopefully that will cover the bases for what I might be serving up.