I have an application that hosts videos, and we recently migrated to Azure.
On our old application we gave the ability for users to either play or download the video. However on Azure it seems like I have to pick between which functionality I want, as the content disposition has to be set on the file and not on the request.
So far I have came up with two very poor solutions.
The first solution is streaming the download through my MVC server.
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["StorageConnectionString"]);
CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference("videos");
string userFileName = service.FirstName + service.LastName + "Video.mp4";
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + userFileName); // force download
container.GetBlobReference(service.Video.ConvertedFilePath).DownloadToStream(Response.OutputStream);
return new EmptyResult();
This option works okay for smaller videos, but it is very taxing on my server. For larger videos the operation times out.
The second option is hosting every video twice.
This option is obviously bad, as I will have to pay double the storage cost.
As far as I know, azure blob storage doesn't support add the custom header to the special container.
I suggest you could follow and vote this feedback to push the azure develop team to support this feature.
Here is a workaround, you could compression the video file firstly, then uploaded to the azure blob storage.
It will not be opened by the browser.