VLC HowTo/Transcode from Flash Video format

This page describes how to fix broken .flv files.

Other "how to" pages

You can use ffmpeg to change .flv files to .avi files (or one of many other types of files).

If you have problems playing .flv files, changing them to .avi will probably fix the problem.

Windows

Install

Precompiled windows binaries are avaliable at:

• http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_builds/

Pick the file ffmpeg-SVN-r6708-static-gpl-win32.zip

Extract the files from the .zip and copy ffmpeg.exe to your Windows directory (Windows folder), or somewhere else in your search path.

Run

Ffmpeg.exe is command-line based, so to use it you need to open a command prompt. In the start menu pick "Run", and type

cmd.exe

into the box and press enter. This opens a cool black box with white text. It'll say something like C:\>.

At the prompt, type

cd "somewhere"

where "somewhere" is the path to the folder where you saved your files, it's probably something like

cd "c:\windows\profiles\user\Desktop\"

Then press enter. You can find out the path (location) of a file by right clicking on the file and selecting properties.

Finally type

ffmpeg -i "your_file.flv" "your_file.avi"

and press enter. This takes "your_file.flv" as the input file and spits out "your_file.avi" as an avi file. Job done (at last!)

Close the command prompt by closing the window as normal, or typing "exit".