Streaming Flash movies on IIS6 | Rickard Andersson

Streaming Flash movies on IIS6

Feb 5, 2007

I’ve been struggling on and off with streaming a Flash video file (.flv) from within a Flash Player movie (.swf) on certain webservers. Took me a while before I realized the servers that were causing problems were all running Windows Server 2003 (and thus IIS6). When I realized IIS6 was the culprit, the solution was relatively easy to find. Have a look at the technote Windows 2003 Server does not stream FLV videos on Adobe’s website. For those of you who would rather stay away from that website, here’s the short story:

With IIS 6.0, Microsoft changed the way streaming media is handled. Previous versions of IIS did not require any modification to stream Flash Video. Microsoft IIS 6.0, the default web server that ships with Windows 2003, requires a MIME type to recognize that FLV files are streamed media.

So, in order to get streaming to work, you need to add a custom MIME type in the Internet Information Services Manager. Just add a MIME type for the .flv extension with a value of flv-application/octet-stream. Voila!

14 comments

  1. Stephen
    Posted March 1, 2007 at 3:20 am | Permalink

    Thank you, this was very helpful and worked perfectly.

  2. Alex
    Posted April 17, 2007 at 2:56 pm | Permalink

    No Voila, it doesn’t work to me… any solution from Microsoft found?????

  3. Rickard
    Posted April 17, 2007 at 3:26 pm | Permalink

    I don’t know. They must be aware of it.

    Try restarting IIS if you haven’t already.

  4. Hal
    Posted October 4, 2007 at 2:50 pm | Permalink

    Worked like a charm! Thank you.

  5. Newbie
    Posted October 11, 2007 at 10:01 am | Permalink

    Thank you for posting this useful info!

  6. Brien
    Posted March 3, 2008 at 3:16 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the post! Worked perfectly and made my wife happy. Can’t ask for anything more.

  7. Axel
    Posted July 16, 2008 at 7:05 pm | Permalink

    That was really fast and helpful,
    thx for posting this

  8. MJ
    Posted July 27, 2008 at 3:11 pm | Permalink

    After adding the MIME for .flv I can still only see wmv files on my server (using Media Server) and not FLV

  9. Richard Starr
    Posted July 30, 2008 at 3:52 pm | Permalink

    You will need to restart the web publishing service
    (open admin tools, services, world wide web publishing service)

  10. Fatih USLU
    Posted March 17, 2009 at 1:24 pm | Permalink

    Hi,

    In Event Viewer, returnet error from iis6 that “Cannot load tyoe FLVStreaming in web.config line xxx”

    flvstreaming.cs file is in app_code folder.
    all settings are done
    video.flv file is under my site root folder…

    how can i fix this?

    thank you

  11. Rickard
    Posted March 17, 2009 at 1:51 pm | Permalink

    What’s on that particular line in your web.config?

  12. Sunny
    Posted April 30, 2009 at 8:35 pm | Permalink

    I have added the required mime type to my server. Have also restarted IIS several times and have manually restarted the Web publishing service. However flv and mp4 files will still not show through the .swf player that have on my asp.net page. Works beautifully on my development machine which is XP pro.

  13. Mani
    Posted July 7, 2009 at 1:07 am | Permalink

    Works beautifully. thank you very much.

  14. Fethry
    Posted October 5, 2009 at 2:53 pm | Permalink

    If you are like me and you have tried anything without success then try this.
    For the particular folder, virtual folder or site add:

    Extension: .*
    Mime Type: application/octet-stream

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. Your email is never published nor shared.