Download Problems

I've had several complaints that users are having trouble downloading the (.mp4) videos on lullabot.com when they click on the download link. The problem is that the QuickTime plugin recognizes the download as a video and decides to play it in the browser. This is confusing for the user who has just clicked "download"... especially since they don't end up with the video in their download directory like they were hoping for.

Right clicking and selecting "download link..." also gives odd/unexpected behavior because of the http redirect (drupal_goto()). Usually they end up downloading a file called "download" that the system doesn't know how to open.

Another problem with the download redirects is that iTunes doesn't follow them. This means that if you want to track the downloads, you can't successfully provide a video-podcast that iTunes will recognize. It looks like the current solution to this is that video.module is not tracking downloads initiated through RSS feeds (it just serves out a direct Apache link to the files directory).

Okay... so some solutions:

1) Audio.module seems to have solved this download/tracking/redirect problem pretty nicely. I recommend taking a look at the download code in that module. You can find it around line 1400 here.

2) By sending header('Content-type: application/octet-stream'); (rather than 'Content-Type: '. $node->audio_file->filemime, as the audio module does it,) it's actually possible to force download of the file rather than inline display. You can see an example of this in the sIFR module: line 784 here.

Seems that by combining these two things, we could get a considerably better download system for video.module.