FLV, or Flash Video, is a file format or codec used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe (Macromedia) Flash Player, and supports H.264 video and HE-AAC audio, or been embedded within SWF files. FLV is widely used in video sharing or hosting sites, such as YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, MetaCafe and more.
When viewing online via web browser, just the Adobe Flash Player plug-in or add-on is suffice to playback the Flash Video. Many people does download FLV or Flash Video into locally saved video files. Although nowadays it’s easy to convert FLV to AVI, MPG and other common media formats, some of which even supports download and convert in one operation, and some online FLV download and conversion service does not even require installation, some users may still need to playback FLV files.
To open and view the FLV video files, normally third-party program such as MPlayer, VLC media player, Quicktime, standalone FLV player, or any player which uses DirectShow filters with ffdshow filter installed is used. Windows Media Player (WMP), the default media player comes with Windows, does not have built-in native support to play FLV Flash Video though.
In order to let Windows Media Player to support playback of FLV, there is a simple solution in order to add and install support of FLV to WMP, without messing with ffdshow filters (Tip: actually by just installing ffdshow, WMP will support playing of FLV) . PlayFLV is capable of enable Windows Media Player to play FLV (Flash Video) files.
What PlayFLV does is that it installs and registers FLVSplitter by Gabest, and then binds or associates FLV files to Windows Media Player, enabling playback of FLV files by simply double-clicking on the files with .FLV extension PlayFLV setup installer will also prompt user to download and install ffdshow, required for movies in Flash 7 file format.
Features of PlayFLV
- Plugin that enables Windows Media Player to playback FLV files.
- Features all default functions, such as zooming, skipping and full screen view.
- Creates file association: Double-click FLV files to play them in Windows Media Player.
- Very lightweight plugin.
- Free and open source (download source code of PlayFLV).
Download PlayFLV: PlayFLV.exe
Tip and Trick