Generally when you are doing podcasts using Sakai you end up doing uploads using webdav because the files are so large – they end up busing the single file upload limit in the Resources tool.
I have become increasingly unhappy with the Apple’s Web Dav client built into Mac OS/X 10.5. It seems to be always downloading all the time – I am guessing that perhaps my operating system is trying to show me little preview icons in my finder view – so it downloads 300MB of data each time I mount the Dav drive.
Whatever the cause – Mac’s incessant unnecessary downloading was making my uploads unreliable – so I switched to Goliath.
Goliath makes up loads much nicer – it is a simple tool – it only retrieves information when you do something – more like a smart FTP. The built in support for Dav is using DAVFS – which is faking a real disk using webdav. This leads to some extra load on the server.
However Goliath marks the Mime-Type of the file as text – Yikes! My students download the podcasts and see gibberish in their browsers or end up with files with a suffix of .txt and Quicktime won’t play them! Grrr.
The Sakai Resources tool comes to the rescue – thanks to a feature added for OSP a long time ago, you can control the MIME-type of an uploaded file.
Go to Resources – find the file – and in the Actions menu (yay Harriet, Jim and the whole resources 2.4 re-design team) – find the Edit Details option.
Scroll down and change the MIME Type to application / octet-stream – save the properties – and viola – browsers save them properly – players play them – they end up with the right suffixes. All is well.