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[Tamao]

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[Shep]

Vlc can't do it and neither can gxine.

From what I have read, vlc and mplayer should both be able to play flv videos. If yours doesn't, it may be because you are lacking a codec or something, rather than the player being incapable. If you open a terminal and try to run them from the commandline you should get some enlightening error messages.

There do exist standalone players, search on google if you wish. But the only really up to date for all extensions is likely to be Adobe's standalone player, which on http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html is known as a Flash Video Projector and is about 4MB. I have not used it.

I do think it should be possible to play a video file in your browser by entering the url as file pathname, such as file:///mnt/sda6/filename.flv but I find that my mplayer plugin plays just the audio component of a .flv video when I try this. So it only half works.

EDIT: To play a flash video file using the standalone mplayer, I need to open a terminal and on the commandline specify extra arguments for mplayer, specifically: mplayer -vo gl2 -mc 0 -framedrop /mnt/sda6/filename.flv

Some of these help because my cpu is slow. -vo is necessary because there is no video otherwise. You can get brief help with arguments by typing: mplayer --help
I reckon there is probably a config file somewhere that I could store these so I don't need to rediscover them each time.

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[Iguleder]

4.3.1 can't play FLV because its xine-lib wasn't compiled against x264.

In other words, 4.3.1 cannot play FLV. However, Lupu and all newish puppies have that capability. gxine, mplayer and VLC should work just fine.

[disciple]

Installing an updated ffmpeg and/or media player would also let you play them.
The gxine that came in 4.3.1 should play most .flv files, although a file association may not be set up. But I believe youtube did start using a new codec in some .flv files a while back, which an older ffmpeg can't understand.