The issue: I could not get any of the popular FLV plugins to work on my site. They would all install and posting was easy enough but for some reason they would never start an FLV stream. Spin and Spin and Spin but never a video play. After trying several of them (there are many good ones and not hard to find) and talking to some developer buddies of mine we determinded it was IIS 6 (Windows 2003) that was the culprit. Since I host my own web sites from my home and everyone who pays for hosting did not seem to experience this behavior – I felt confident there was something different about my setup.

The first thing I found was this TechNote article at Abobe. This really was only half of the issue. Since Windows 2003/IIS6 – by default – no longer supported FLV streamimg the MIME Type had to be fixed first (STEP 1). Then further searching came up with this article. Even though this article was a bit off subject, it was enough to piece the following tutorial together.

It was a three step process to fix.

STEP 1

Go to the “IIS Manager” properties from the Management Console.

Select the “MIME Types…” button to bring up the “MIME Types” dialog box.

If the .flv extension exists, “Edit…” to look like this:

If it does not exist, click “New…” and add the extension and MIME Type as shown above. Simple addition of a MIME Extension for “.flv” with a MIME type value of “flv-application/octet-stream” completes step 1.
This is a global setting for the entire box.

STEP 2

Specific to the site in question.
Have the .flv extension for the particular site handled by ASP.NET.

First, you need the version of ASP.net framework the site is using:
It can be found on the site’s properties ‘ASP.net’ tab.
In my instance I am using version 1.1.4322 of the framework.

Next, select the ‘Home Directory’ Tab.
Click on the ‘Configuration’ button which opens the ‘Application Configuration’ dialog with the ‘Mappings’ tab selected.
Look for .flv in the extensions window, if it is there edit it to look like this:

Notice the Executable is the aspnet_isapi.dll of the websites asp.net version which we found on the site’s ‘ASP.NET’ tab.
In my instance it is .NET 1.1 so I browsed to the following:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll

If it is not present, ‘Add’ it instead of ‘Edit’

STEP 3

Restart IIS.