FLVPlayer
Editors’ Review
You’ll be impressed with this very handy, simple Flash video player, though a couple of quirks bring it down a notch or two from perfection.
FLVPlayer’s five-button interface doesn’t need a help file. Opening an FLV file is a mere matter of choosing it from a dialog or dragging and dropping it onto FLVPlayer. We really liked how this utility always correctly set the aspect ratio during playback, but some users may wish that the videos could be enlarged to fill the screen.
The volume slider is unobtrusive but difficult to finely set. On the other hand, the video position slider can be set to the hundredth of second. Buttons to move to the beginning or end of the video aren’t as useful as they could be since the End button is disabled. Occasionally, moving the position slider to a particular second didn’t work. Instead, pressing Play simply moved the slider to its previous position and restarted the video.
Flaws notwithstanding, anyone who has a collection of Flash Video files will love this tiny freeware player.
WHAT’S NEW IN VERSION 1.1
Developer’s Description
FLVPlayer is a simple Microsoft Windows program that serves a single purpose–provides a quick and flexible way for opening FLV encoded video files. As many people who encode video in Flash Video (FLV) format have probably realized, there is no program provided by Macromedia that allows easy previewing of FLV files. This is where FLVPlayer comes into play.
FLVPlayer allows users to open an FLV in numerous ways–double click the file, right-click the file and select Open from the context menu, browse for the file within FLVPlayer, and drag and drop the file into FLVPlayer. Furthermore, by utilizing the MediaPlayback component, FLVPlayer is able to display the video in the correct aspect ratio so your preview will exactly match how it will look when playing from your Web site. So, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to preview FLV files, FLVPlayer is just the utility you have been searching for.