When trying to serve up a Windows Media Video file from my Apache webserver, I ran into the problem of Firefox being unable to handle the file properly. It would simply load it as a plain text file, resulting in a bunch of jibberish representing the machine code of the video (as if you had opened the video with Notepad). It turns out that with a stock install, Apache does not know how to serve this type of file, so it serves it as the default, which is plain text. It’s an easy fix, you simply have to tell Apache how to serve these types of files. Open up /etc/mime.types and add the following line:
video/x-ms-wmv wmv
You will also need to add the following to your httpd.conf file:
AddType video/x-ms-wmv .wmv
Save and exit, restart Apache, and your browser should now prompt you for how you want to handle the file (Open/Save).