What is FLV File and How to Play?

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What is FLV File and How to Play?

2 February 2019 Ashley S. Miller Specialist of Customer Service Dept.

Summary
FLV, referred to as “FLASH VIDEO”, is a video format designed for Flash MX. Originally, developed by Macromedia, the encoding mode of FLV data is the same as SWF. Its tiny size and quick loading make watching videos online possible, which was once welcomed.

Content

1. What is FLV File

2. MP4 – Hot Video Format

How to Convert FLV to MP4

3. Why FLV doesn’t Work on Google Chrome

How to Play FLV on Google Chrome

1. What is FLV File

Videos and podcast websites spreads through the Internet now. FLV, the video format which has ever been fast-growing and widely used, can be easily imported to Flash and uphold copyright protection. Few years ago, FLV was supported by many websites, such as YouTube, because it takes the advantages of small size, low CPU usage, well-qualified play effect and abundant resource.

However, in 2011, Adobe announced that it stopped developing Flash Player beyond PC and it would concentrate on HTML5, which affected the use of FLV files. In the following, comparison between Flash and HTML5 will be raised.

	Flash player	HTML5 player
Video format	H.264, Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6	90% support of H.264; varying support of WebM, Ogg Theora
Streaming video	Flash videos H.264 supported; support MP4 in some players	IE, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera supported
Safety	● Flash takes more accessibility to visit local file system while JavaScript is strictly limited by the sandbox mechanism. ● Lots of 0Day bugs: in 2015, NTT Group, the safety organization, released Top10 dangerous bugs which are all from Flash.	Offers better safety. The strict sandbox mechanism of browsers limits JavaScript, which makes HTML5 safe.

2. MP4 – Hot Video Format

MP4, the compression encoding standard used in audio and video information, is formulated by the moving image expert group under International Standardization Organization (ISO) and International Electro-technical Commission (IEC); it is accepted by more browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari and UC Browser. Therefore, you can convert your FLV to MP4 when it doesn’t work on the browser and other players.

How to Convert FLV to MP4

1. Open Renee Video Editor Pro, then click [Video Toolbox].

click video toolbox in renee video editor pro

2. Click [Add Files], and choose the targeted video format.

3. Click the pull-up list in [Output Format].

4. Choose your target video format or related play device. Here we choose MP4.

5. Choose your target output format and output folder; then click [Start] and wait for a minute.

6. Click [Stop] and reset the video format when you want to modify output settings.

7. Open the output file and check it when it is finished.

8. Now, FLV is converted to MP4.

3. Why FLV doesn’t Work on Google Chrome

Flash has ever been welcomed but it has some demerits, such high electricity consumption and low safety. Moreover, these demerits are becoming more and more obvious as the portable devices and APPs develops. Therefore, in 2015, Google announced that it stopped self-start of Flash plug-in in Chrome browser to avoid these undesirable results, while users can play FLV on Google Chrome through self-set.