I had reason to run a downloaded flv file on my local system today. I tried three different players in the following order:
- Flash Video Player by FlashGuru
- Apollo Flash Video Player by Mutationevent.com,
- FLV Player 1.3.3 by Martijn de Visser
The first two both installed just fine, but when I double clicked my .flv file, the respective player started up and then nothing happened. So I moved on from those players in about 30 seconds.
The third player by Martijn de Visser installed easily and played my flv file when I double clicked on it first try! It has a nice, very simple interface, with a couple of basic features (such as zoom 1x, 2x, load file, load url, etc). The player certainly is lacking in advanced features and the author is aware of this and created a spot to post your wishlist for v2 features. However, that was back in April ‘06 and he hasn’t blogged much since then, so the project might be abandoned–I can’t tell. Either way, this basic player serves its purpose well. Download it here:
You might also try Perian
http://perian.org/
as a quicktime plugin, I run it on my mac, but maybe they have a version for windows too, i dunno. This makes the best FLV player around.
Also the Democracy video player supports FLVs somehow, works well too.
Left by Timothy Johnson on May 21st, 2007
One little problem I have run into with previewing flv’s in players is that most don’t support the alpha channel, so you here audio but don’t see the video.
Left by Brandon DeLauney on May 21st, 2007