FLV Player For Linux
I’ve seen this question a few times on various Linux forums – how do you play FLV files (AKA Flash video) on Linux? – so I figured I’d write up a short post about my favorite Linux FLV player. As you would expect, it’s open source and it can also handle lots of video formats besides FLV.
I use VLC media player for playing FLV files on Linux. VLC is an extremely versatile cross-platform media player. The best part about it is it’s a standalone player – support for various file formats is already built into the player, so usually there’s no need to look for codecs. It just works.
Installing the VLC player is easy. The download page lists detailed installation instructions and precompiled binaries are available for many popular *nix distributions. For example, in Ubuntu you can install this player by simply firing up Synaptic and installing the “vlc” package (details). See the VLC site for instructions for other systems.
Bonus tip : If viewing .flv on Linux isn’t enough for you, or you want to share the videos in a more common format, you can convert FLV files to MPG with ffmpeg.
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Thank you very much for posted this great article!
I use VLC successfully to play FLV files in Windows.
But for some reason I can’t get the Linux version to do so. I’ ve tried on an Acer Aspire One using their own version called Linpus, and also with Ubuntu.
It just won’t play the FLV file.
What to do?
Try updating to the latest version of VLC. Also, I’ve heard rumours that Mplayer can play .flv files on Linux, so give that a shot. Finally, you could always try and convert the file(s) to AVI using ffmpeg (though that’s bound to be a bit complicated).
The links here and on the VideoLAN site lead to lists of tar balls and rpms. No clue whatsoever about which are required and no instructions to be seen. How does that help?