You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

Coderpina's avatar
Coderpina
New member | Level 2
6 years ago

Multimedia and MIME Types ?

Hiyo . 
I have a low-traffic webpage that calls 1-3 [legal] sound files hosted on my personal public dropbox folder. I'm troubleshooting their inconsistent playback, testing different HTML5 audio tag tweaks, browser compatibilities, converters/headers/encodings.  I want to make sure Dropbox is not in the list of implicated variables. 

It has been flagged on this forum in the past that Dropbox erroneously expects MIME type as Plain Text, and vulnerably uses the file-extension alone to determine type. Dropbox’s serving my 

1. Have multimedia filetypes for Mp4, Ogg, Mp3 audio been added to the .htaccess file of Dropbox servers?
2. Is my current Dropbox link syntax the best for my particular use case:
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/pwdfzbrh435aaq9/lietoofine_-_03_-_Get_Over_the_FOMO.mp4?dl=1
(Depending on the format, the filesize ranges from 2MB to 6MB, and I would rather Dropbox streamed instead of delivered the whole file first, but I saw on another post that the DL=1 ensures the file is served to an external call properly. I believe this may depend on the metadata of the file itself for seeking/when to start playback?)

Thank you!


  • I'm not sure I follow your post entirely (it looks like you may have something cut off at "Dropbox’s serving my "...?)

    1. A ".htaccess" configuration file is specific to certain kinds of web servers, but I don't believe Dropbox uses them. Is there a particular behavior with Dropbox you're having trouble with? If you provide steps to reproduce the issue, as well as the unexpected error or output we can take a look, though I can't promise we'd be able to change the behavior for you.

    2. In this link, you're using the "dl.dropbox.com" domain, which isn't officially supported for linking to files. It may currently work, but we can't promise it will continue to. (The same goes for "dl.dropboxusercontent.com".)

    The only officially supported/documented way is to use "www.dropbox.com", optionally using the URL parameters documented here. Those may or may not suit your use case though.

  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    I'm not sure I follow your post entirely (it looks like you may have something cut off at "Dropbox’s serving my "...?)

    1. A ".htaccess" configuration file is specific to certain kinds of web servers, but I don't believe Dropbox uses them. Is there a particular behavior with Dropbox you're having trouble with? If you provide steps to reproduce the issue, as well as the unexpected error or output we can take a look, though I can't promise we'd be able to change the behavior for you.

    2. In this link, you're using the "dl.dropbox.com" domain, which isn't officially supported for linking to files. It may currently work, but we can't promise it will continue to. (The same goes for "dl.dropboxusercontent.com".)

    The only officially supported/documented way is to use "www.dropbox.com", optionally using the URL parameters documented here. Those may or may not suit your use case though.