What is a .FLV file?
FLV is the Flash Video container, once the standard for web video.
- Did you know
- FLV powered nearly all web video in the early YouTube era before Flash was retired by Adobe in 2020.
- FLV was created by Macromedia and arrived with Flash Player 6, before Adobe acquired Macromedia and inherited the format.
- Early FLV files used the Sorenson Spark codec, with the higher-quality On2 VP6 added later in Flash Player 8.
- When YouTube launched, it served its clips as FLV, relying on the near-ubiquitous Flash plug-in to play video in any browser.
- The rise of HTML5 video and the eventual end of Adobe Flash support left FLV obsolete, with sites moving to MP4 instead.
- What Analyser shows you
- Read the container, codec, resolution, and frame rate of MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, and WebM video, step through frames, and extract the audio track. Raw H.264/H.265 elementary streams (.h264/.265) are remuxed to MP4 in-browser so they play too, as are AVCHD camcorder files (.mts/.m2ts) - the video is copied and the audio transcoded to AAC. Sony cameras (Alpha, FX, RX) that embed a gyro / accelerometer "rtmd" timed-metadata track have that inertial data decoded and plotted - the same gyroscope and accelerometer samples Gyroflow and Catalyst Browse use to stabilise footage - alongside the ISO, white balance and capture time.
- Open a .FLV file
- Drag a .FLV file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.