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

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13 Answers

up vote 32 down vote

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

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+1 as you included the link! – Wayne Sep 3 '09 at 23:52
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 '09 at 3:12
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up vote 5 down vote

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

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up vote 4 down vote

Media Player Classic or VLC.

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up vote 3 down vote

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 '09 at 0:49
Same here. I'd rather use Media Player Classic for my movie viewing. – alex Sep 7 '09 at 13:58
mplayer != MPC :) mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html – salmonmoose Sep 8 '09 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 '09 at 1:39
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up vote 3 down vote

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.

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up vote 1 down vote

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.

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up vote 1 down vote

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

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up vote 0 down vote

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.

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up vote 0 down vote

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.

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up vote 0 down vote

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)

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up vote 0 down vote

Some nice FLV player alternatives here:

http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-watch-flv-videos-on-your.html

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Instead of just linking somewhere, please write a full answer and tell us which alternatives there are, and link to their download page. (I can only see two on this website). – slhck Jun 22 '11 at 14:14
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up vote 0 down vote

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.

alt text

A portable version is available here.

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up vote 0 down vote

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:

enter image description here

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 '11 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 '11 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 '11 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 '11 at 21:45
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