I’ve used Amazon S3 for some time now on and off - it’s a great, fast, cheap service, but it does have its own quirks.

Developing a site that hosts a Flash movie displaying a series of flv encoded videos, we decided to host the flv content on S3 to save on bandwidth costs in case we got mass amounts of traffic.

First problem we encountered was performance - with a bucket created using the default location the videos were loading slower than they were playing, but switching to use a bucket created to be located in Europe, the speed has no longer been a problem.

The last issue which really took some head scratching was reported by some testers that the videos weren’t loading - they tended to be testing from behind corporate firewalls.

It would seem that when we used the S3Fox Firefox extension to upload the files, it didn’t know what flv’s were so didn’t set a Content-type. S3 default response is not to sent a Content-Type, which it would appear these obtuse firewalls didn’t like so blocked it.

The solution was to knock up a php based upload script using the Amazon S3 PHP class written by Donovan Schonknecht specifying ‘video/x-flv’ as a Content-Type - works a treat.