Solution to GoDaddy m4v Mime Type/.htaccess issues

I moved my web hosting to GoDaddy 3 days ago and while there have been few problems, I had run up against an issue serving iPod-ready Quicktime video files (.m4v) from my server. The server insisted on serving them up as text/plain type instead of video/x-m4v.

GoDaddy responded that I needed to use .htaccess to enable this file type, but they offer no support in creating these .htaccess files.

In trying to solve this problem, I discovered that my issues and the issues of hundreds of other GoDaddy users appears to be the line endings used in the .htaccess text file.

Working from a Mac using BBEdit, my .htaccess file was saved with Mac line endings, meaning that each line ends with a CR (carriage return) character. Instead, these .htaccess files must be saved with Unix line endings, meaning that a LF (linefeed) must terminate each line.

Forcing BBEdit to save the file with Unix line endings and re-uploading the file to the server allowed the AddType directives to be recognized and serve up the m4v files correctly to the web browser.

I would be interested in hearing from others who have experienced this issue and if this solution works for you, as well.

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