What’s In a FLV File?

FLV, also known as “Flash Video”, is a favourite video format. It is mainly used for streaming video over the Internet; it’s also the format that YouTube and other favourite video sites use. On the technical side, the FLV format can support a number of different video and audio codecs. However, most often it uses H.263 or H.264 (higher quality) video compression and the MP3 codec for audio.

Picking a FLV Player

Now that you’ve got a bit of (hopefully not too boring) background info, lets move to the central question : finding a free FLV player. And you’re in luck, as I’ve already done the research for you. It turns out there are lots of video players, but most of the so-called “FLV players” appear to be just bare-bones hacks with minimal functionality. The ideal player I could find was VLC (a.k.a Videolan media player).

VLC — the FLV Player’s Features

It plays FLV files. Duh.
It’s free. The VLC player is free and open source. It also works on almost any operating system, including Windows (all versions), Mac OS X and various flavors of Linux and BSD.

Can play partial FLV files. For example, if you’re downloading a massive video and want to check the image/sound calibre before the download is complete, you can open the file in the VLC player and view the part that’s already downloaded.
Extremely stable. No matter what kind of file you throw at it, VLC will do it’s ideal to play it. Even if the file is corrupted or encrypted, this FLV player won’t crash or lock up your system. I’ve been using if for over 2 years and it has crashed just once.
Can open all favourite video and audio formats (not just FLV).

You can download the VLC player at http://www.flvplayerdownload.org/

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