Question

I want to have a static mp4 video file in my Google App Engine application. I put it in the “war” folder and I add the following lines to my appengine-web.xml file:

  <static-files>
      <include path="/**.mp4" />
  </static-files>

Unfortunately, when I run the app and type in the video’s URL into my browser, nothing really happens. I just get a blank page or the previous page stays unchanged, if there was any. I don’t get a 404 error. Server log is clear. I would expect the browser to play the video or download it. Why is it not working?

The video file I’m using is 6.35MB.

I also tested some other small video files I downloaded from the internet and I made sure my browser was playing them when they were on their original servers. They didn’t work as well.

I uploaded mp3 files, as well as flv video files and they worked just fine. The mp3 file was played by the browser and the flv file was downloaded by it.

The question is once again, why can’t I have a static mp4 file in my Google App Engine application? Are they forbidden? Are my files corrupt in some way? Am I doing something wrong?

EDIT:
When writing this question, I only used Google Chrome to test if the uploaded video works. I just checked other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer) and everything seems to be fine. I was also able do download the video file with curl. It turns out that the problem only exists in Google Chrome. When I open it’s developer tool (F12) and go to the Network tab, I can see that the request’s status is “(cancelled)”.

Answer 1

The Google Chrome developer tool (F12) showed in the Network tab, that the response’s MIME type is application/octet-stream. I was wondering if this could be the reason why Chrome couldn’t interpret it correctly and cancelled it.

I added the following lines to my web.xml file, to make sure my video file has a correct MIME type set:

<mime-mapping>
    <extension>mp4</extension>
    <mime-type>video/mp4</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

Everything works fine now.