The FLV file type is a container for flash video (Flash Video). Over the course of several years of a competitive video streaming market, FLV has become the format of choice for internet-based video and an FLV Player is nearly a necessity. It was originally a proprietary format designed and owned by Adobe, and it required the use of Adobe Flash Player to play.

Adobe later released the design structure of FLV player videos to the general public, and allowed for other video players to play as well as create FLV videos of their own. It was this open to the public stance, as well as Adobe Flash Player’s ability to operate in virtually every operating system, that made several high-level companies drop RealVideo and WMV in favor of FLV.

It was only a short matter of time for the open-source community to fully adopt the FLV codec in virtually every open-source video player. This adoption was sped up by the work of the FFMpeg codec design team, who allowed anybody to view their code source, as well as implement the FFMpeg codecs in any other open source video player.

The VLC player is one of several open-source video players available online that utilizes the FFMpeg audio-video codec. The FFMpeg codec is compiled and available in every release of VLC, and the code for the entire VLC project is open to the public. Playing an FLV file with VLC is easy, and as far as the VLC player is concerned, playing a FLV file is natural. Since the FLV file format is completely covered in the FFMpeg codec project, VLC requires no other libraries to play this format, and there is no foreign compression to deal with.

The VLC player is one of the more polished Video Players available. To play an FLV file with VLC, it is as easy as dragging the video file into the window of the running VLC instance, and VLC will automatically play the file for you. With several hundred million downloads, VLC has become a Video Player in its own right. Playing an FLV file whose design is open to the public, with VLC, an open source Video Player, is the most natural thing in the world.