iPad HTML5 Video mime problem

I know. You have been beating your keyboard against your desk for hours getting that html5 video embed test working in MobileSafari on the iPad. You must have melted a small glacier re-encoding with every combination of container, encoding, and bitrate!

You checked and double checked your video tag. (You made sure to close the </video> and </source> tags right? Of course you did. You’re a professional after all.)

I know what the problem is. But I’m not going to tell you. Ok, ok, I’ll tell you, but only because I like you and I don’t want you to get fired.

Surprise! It’s your web server’s Content-Type header!

For some weird reason, browsers will disregard the mime type you explicitly wrote in the <source type="video/mp4"/> tag, and instead choose to trust the mime type coming from the server. For example, older IIS servers treat .mp4 files as application/octet-stream which seems ok to me, but simply did not fly with iPad.

Now how do you change your web server’s mime map? That’s between you and Google, buddy.