Just a quick tip today – the solution to a bit of a ‘gotcha’!

While writing the jCaps plugin, we came up against an issue where .ogv videos were refusing to load, but bizarrely, only in Firefox. In its place was a grey box where the video should be, with a question mark in the middle.

After a little bit of head-scratching, we found the solution – Apache wasn’t sending the right MIME type with the video, resulting in a Firefox fail. The solution is to put the following AddType directive in your .htaccess or httpd.conf file (mod_mime is required):

AddType video/ogg .ogv

Make sure that you restart Apache if you put it in httpd.conf.

On another note, jCaps is nearing another release – hopefully this week. It will take into account some of Bruce Lawson’s wishlist, and includes a big refactoring of many elements of the plugin, including the API. It should be leaner, meaner, and easier to use! In the meantime, you can fork or download the project at Github.