Video Files Download as HTML

Customer wants mpegs, gets html

[EBWriter]

Hello, I have a conundrum. I run a web site from which customers download files. One customer has attempted to download some video files and he says that they download as html files that only have a short line of characters. This customer says that this occurs on Mac and Windows, in Firefox and IE. Can anyone advise?

Thanks.

[eelixduppy]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, EBWriter!

Is this only happening for this one person? If he/she is the only one who mentioned anything about it for as long as it's been running, then odds are that he/she is doing something wrong or that it is only a problem on that computer, in which case I don't know what's happening.

I'd make sure he/she is following the correct procedure and possible have him/her try it on another computer for confirmation.

Maybe someone else can provide some insight as to what could possible be happening if this is only a problem for one person.

Best of luck! :)

[EBWriter]

This is why I am looking for help. We have been in business for a year. No one else has ever reported this kind of problem, or is currently reporting this problem. So it is one person out of many, which makes me think it is on their machine.

This leads me to other questions:

Would MIME type settings in the browsers affect this, even though the customer is downloading and not streaming the content?

If the customer was running a router behind a DSL modem, could router settings cause this? Or firewall settings for that matter?

I am fairly new to this and I cannot get even a small handle into it.

Thanks your your help.

[txbakers]

It could be something as simple as that customer not having a Windows Media Player or other media player installed/configured correctly.

[choster]

Is the customer able to download other video content? Some corporate firewalls and nanny software block all media content indiscriminately.

And yes, the MIME type matters—it always matters if you want to do things right—so it's worth having a look either way. For instance, they may be set correctly for .asf and .asx files, but not for .wmv. Browsers, especially IE, may guess the correct type based on the file extension, but they don't always get it right, which is why you occasionally encounter a weird error message about PointPlus or Statistica when downloading CSS.

[EBWriter]

Thank you for your responses! I will get more information and get back to you as soon as I know anything.