Streaming Flash movies on IIS6
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!
9 comments
Thank you, this was very helpful and worked perfectly.
No Voila, it doesn’t work to me… any solution from Microsoft found?????
I don’t know. They must be aware of it.
Try restarting IIS if you haven’t already.
Worked like a charm! Thank you.
Thank you for posting this useful info!
Thanks for the post! Worked perfectly and made my wife happy. Can’t ask for anything more.
That was really fast and helpful,
thx for posting this
After adding the MIME for .flv I can still only see wmv files on my server (using Media Server) and not FLV
You will need to restart the web publishing service
(open admin tools, services, world wide web publishing service)