[nonhuman]

I have a MPEG-4 encoded video on a web site, and I want to set up a download link for it. But for some reason if I just link to it and then try to download it Safari appends a .txt to the file name. All that needs to be done is to remove that .txt and it'll play just fine in Quicktime, but that's a pain in the ass and really shouldn't be necessary. I've also noticed it will do the same thing with other sorts of files. It likes to append .html to various other files that I have download links to and things like that.

Is there any way to stop it from doing that?

[Tsilou B.]

That's not Safari's fault. The web server is probably configured wrongly, so that it tells Safari the file is a text file. Safari then adds the .txt extension because it knows that the "text file" would otherwise be opened with Quicktime (and it cannot know that would be right.)

With Apache, e.g., you have to edit the configuration file and add the command:

AddType video/mp4 .mp4

if the file has the .mp4 extension. If you cannot change the configuration of Apache, because it's not your own server, then you can still put the line in a new text file called ".htaccess" and place that text file in the same directory as your video file. (You should call the file "htaccess" first and rename it to ".htaccess" on the server, because Mac OS X doesn't let you rename files to something with a dot at the beginning.)

If your server doesn't run Apache, you should look in the documentation to see how to add mimetypes.

[nonhuman]

Hmm, that's a pain.

Could that still be the issue even though it doesn't do this in Firefox?

[tavilach]

I had the exact same issue...Yesterday. Haha. And I did what Tsilou said, except I don't actually run the server, so I went into my webspace's control panel and added mp4 to the list of MIME types to open in QuickTime.