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Whats the best free video player that will play .flv files on my PC?

12 Answers 12

33

VLC is definitely the way to go on this one. It will play almost anything you throw at it.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html

1
  • Agreed; I've yet to run across a file that makes VLC choke plus I can standardize my video player across platforms.
    – briealeida
    Nov 2, 2009 at 3:12
5

VLC is the best, and there is also a portable version for USB devices from portableapps.com

4

Media Player Classic or VLC.

3

Unlike the rest of the known universe, I don't really like VLC, so instead I'm going to suggest mplayer - which I use to play everything.

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  • worry not, you're not alone :)
    – Molly7244
    Sep 4, 2009 at 0:49
  • Same here. I'd rather use Media Player Classic for my movie viewing.
    – alex
    Sep 7, 2009 at 13:58
  • mplayer != MPC :) mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html Sep 8, 2009 at 2:19
  • I agree. In my opinion MPlayer is much superior to VLC as it is not only smaller but also faster and well-conceived. The console interface is just great. It is very easy to learn. You can even play movies in the framebuffer. VLC is slow and bloated while not giving any real benefits. :)
    – timn
    Nov 15, 2009 at 1:39
3

Media Player Classic Home Cinema.

It has better support for Vista over the older version which has not been updated for over a year. It is freeware, open source, very snappy and light on resources.

1

The open source KMPlayer will play FLV (along with pretty much everything else) without having to install additional codecs. Looks good too.
It's reviewed on the Gizmo's Freeware site.

1

VLC as well as Media Player Classic do the job just fine.

1

Desktop-based FLV player:

Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Unix-based
Adobe Media Player (freeware)
Media Player Classic (free software)
MPlayer (free software)
RealPlayer (freeware)
VLC media player (free software)
Winamp (freeware)

0

CCCP includes all codecs necessary to play FLV files (as well as most popular formats), and also comes with Media Player Classic, which is my favorite player.

0

VLC's a great open source media player, but for Windows I prefer the KMPlayer's GUI, customization features and overall ease of use than VLC.

Like VLC, it can play almost anything you throw at it (including FLV files).

The KMPlayer in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Multimedia_Player

Note: KMPlayer is a Windows software and is freeware, but not open source.

0

SMPlayer is a free, open source front-end for MPlayer. It plays pretty much any media file under the sun and the subtitle features are superior to any other player.

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A portable version is available here.

0

Besides the previously mentioned really good players (like VLC media player which does work on very much platforms, and supports very much formats, or Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which also has 64 bit support), I can also suggest BS.Player (with e.g. Phoenix skin or Mgc3WMP skin, which are very nice).

This player also supports very-very many formats, and its subtitle correction and subtitle appearance customization options are very handy too, which is very important to me when watching films in other languages - in very many players, subtitle appearance customization is too complicated or oversimplified (I know VLC also has this capability, but I think it's a bit over-elaborated...).

It works only on Windows platforms (no Linux or Mac support) for the time being though (Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7), but for Windows it's a really useful media player.

Phoenix skin:

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Mgc3WMP skin:

enter image description here

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  • I edited in the links for you. Note that as per the FAQ you would have to mention any affiliation of a product you're recommending. So if that's the case, please add it.
    – slhck
    Jun 22, 2011 at 14:58
  • @slhck: thanks for editing the post. BUT I don't really understand, why would I have ANY affiliation of this product?! I recommended a product which I personally like, and which I found really easy-to-handle. If you mentioned this rule under my comment, why didn't you do it under all the other comments in this thread too? :) Others also mentioned products THEY PERSONALLY LIKE, similarly to me.
    – Sk8erPeter
    Jun 22, 2011 at 21:40
  • Then it's perfectly okay, no worries! You wouldn't know, but every day there are quite a few promotional posts (the player you linked to has a paid version, that's why I asked).
    – slhck
    Jun 22, 2011 at 21:42
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    @slhck: OK, thanks for calming me down, I thought someone would rate my comment as a spam or something for suggesting a player I like... :D Personally I use the free version of it, which is totally enough for my purposes. I only suggest the free one, I wouldn't recommend anyone to buy a player when there are perfect free alternatives on the market (like VLC, MPC-HC). :)
    – Sk8erPeter
    Jun 22, 2011 at 21:45

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