Thursday, March 29, 2007

FLV Player


author: Martijn de Visser
homepage: http://www.martijndevisser.com/

description: FLV Player is a standalone application to play Flash .flv files with. This utility can come in handy when viewing many FLV files, as it doesn't require the Flash IDE. The installer comes with optional .flv association, so double clicking an .flv file opens and plays the file in the player.

author: FLV Player was developed based on Flash Player 8 and utilises the default Macromedia FLV Playback component, that uses a slightly customised skin (blue highlights instead of green). FLV Player is built with Screenweaver Open Source, which is still in beta, so your mileage may vary. Let me know if you encounter unexpected results. Or, even better, join the Screenweaver Open Souce initiative and help us create an even better version of Screenweaver!

One often requested feature that hasn’t been incorporated yet is the “fullscreen” option, Partly because I need some additional time to work on that specific ability, partly because I’m not sure if it’s that usefull. Playing FLV’s fullscreen is very CPU intensive. I think the zoom 2x feature and the resizeable window will suffice for now, but if you’d really like a fullscreen option, drop me line in the comments.

An important note to keep in mind: FLV Player uses the Macromedia Flash 8 FLV Playback component to play .flv files with. This component functions best when your .flv contains valid metadata. All .flv files created with recent encoders such as Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder have their metadata injected automatically. However, if you wish to view older .flv files they may not contain up-to-date metadata. I highly recommend you use Buraks FLV Metadata Injector to automatically inject correct metadata into those files.