FLV and IIS 6

November 10, 2008

I learnt this the hard way a while back and then forgot and went through the pain again recently, so this is more a "note to self", but if it saves someone else some head scratching then that's a bonus!

If you want to serve flv files from IIS 6, which is bundled with Windows 2003 Server, then you need to add it as a MIME Type in IIS. If you don't then you'll not be able to view them via Flash and will get a 404 error when you try try to access them directly.

To add the MIME type to IIS (for all websites):

  1. Fire up Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
  2. Expand out the server tree until you can see "Web Sites" node
  3. Right click on the "Web Sites" node and select "properties"
  4. Select the "HTTP Headers" tab
  5. Click the "MIME Types" button (at the bottom of the dialog box)
  6. Click the "New" button
  7. Type in ".flv" in the extention field (without the quotes)
  8. Type in "video/x-flv" in the MIME Type field (without the quotes)
  9. Click the "OK" button.

If you only want to set it up for one website, then right click on the website node and select "properties" from there.

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