Solved: Video On Amazon S3 Downloading Instead of Playing

Having used Amazon S3 to store and serve our media for a long time – many of them MP4 videos – without problems, I was a little stumped when we encountered a video that won’t play. When you load the URL to the video directly in your browser, it would download instead. Oddly enough, the very same video when uploaded to another account plays perfectly.

As you can imagine, there are so many possibilities here. Is it the video player or the video itself or is it Amazon? It’s always frustrating when there are so many possibilities. However, since the video plays on another S3 account just fine the issue must be with the settings in Amazon.

After quite a bit of time spent finding the solution, the culprit was in the metadata for that file. Not sure what was used to originally upload the file. We’ve used several tools from S3Fox to Clouberry and never encountered this. Somehow, the file’s metadata is not set.

So if you are encountering this issue, make sure the correct metadata is set. In Amazon’s AWS Management Console, select the file in question, click on Actions > Properties and add/edit the key values. In this case, enter Content-Type in the key and video/mp4. See screen shot below. You don’t have to select it from the list you can just type it in if it is missing or wrong. Once you do that and save, your video should play as usual and not be forced to download.

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8 Comments

  1. LexiRodrigo on October 17, 2011 at 3:33 pm

    Haven’t had this happen yet, but now I know what to do if/when it does! Thanks for your persistence in finding a solution, Lynette, and for sharing it with us.



    • lynette.chandler on October 17, 2011 at 6:39 pm

      @LexiRodrigo yup this is one of those you may not need right now but when you do you’ll be so glad 🙂 thank YOU for stopping by



  2. BobMarconi on October 17, 2011 at 4:18 pm

    Thanks for the info. Though I have an S3 account I have not used it yet.



    • lynette.chandler on October 17, 2011 at 6:40 pm

      @BobMarconi Hopefully it will save you some hours when you begin using it 🙂



  3. lynette.chandler on October 17, 2011 at 6:39 pm

    @LexiRodrigo yup this is one of those you may not need right now but when you do you’ll be so glad 🙂 thank YOU for stopping by



  4. courtney on October 19, 2011 at 10:10 pm

    Just had this happen to me for a client and your fix took care of it. Thanks.



    • lynette.chandler on October 20, 2011 at 11:21 am

      @courtney That’s excellent news! I’m so happy this helps



  5. kbhatnagar on November 25, 2011 at 12:59 am

    Hi,

    You can Try my very own tool Bucket Explorer as well, It will provide customize Content-Disposition meta-data tag as well you can set it on batch files. It is easy and help you to set MIME type of all the files as well you can customize your MIME type for several extensions.

    http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/amazon-s3–how-to-raise-file-download-dialog-box.html