There are literally dozens of options out there for FLV playback and FLVPLayer4Free tries to weigh in as one of the more customisable FLV players. Normally, FLV players are rather rudimentary affairs since Flash is not a particularly easy format to work with. However FLVPlayer4Free has tried to add some glitz to the Flash reproduction genre. Amongst many things, you can drag & drop FLV files straight into FLV player and save frames of your favourite films as images although only in three formats - JPG, PNG and BMP. You can instruct it to play in full screen mode and to stop anything else getting in the way of your viewing experience, keep the screen always in the foreground. There are a few limited volume settings including a mute option and you can also put FLV films or videos on a loop if you want. One very simple thing that I find many FLV players ignore is an elapsed time feature which is one thing that is included in FLVPlayer4Free. You can also play as many FLV files as you want at the same time although why anyone would want to do this, I'm not sure since you only have one soundcard to put it all through.

Overall, FLVPlayer4Free is one of the more comprehensive FLV Players on the market although I'm still awaiting the day when FLV players get really serious.

Download FLVPlayer4Free 3.2 in Softonic

Have you ever been in a situation where you've viewed a video on YouTube and you know that it must have been cached on your hard drive somewhere but you can't find it?

If so, then you need VideoCacheView which can find cached FLV files from video sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion. VideoCacheView automatically scans your Internet Explorer or Firefox cache and finds all video files that are currently stored in it. It makes it easy to copy the cached video files into another folder so you can play or watch them whenever you want.

If your movie player can play FLV files it will play the video directly from your browser's cache. Alternatively, you can simply copy and paste the files into another folder so that they're easier to locate without VideoCacheView in the future. However, it's still hard to find the clips that you want because in your cache they've all got similar generic names.

VideoCacheView is a great way to find all those FLV files that you thought were lost forever on your hard drive.

Download VideoCacheView 1.21 in Softonic

With such an ever growing range of multimedia devices, no wonder format converters are becoming so popular these days!

Any Audio/Video Converter is one of those converters: a simple, easy-to-use application that support pretty much any format you can find nowadays and lets you convert both audio and video files in just a few steps.

The program works with a list where you add the files you want to convert, no matter what format they are. Then you configure the conversion options for each one of them separately and finally click on the "Convert" button to let the program do the rest. I think this method is quite handy and saves you loads of work and time; pity the trial version only accepts one file on this list!

Any Audio/Video Converter includes a built-in player in its interface, but it's only good to watch the video while it's being converted and not preview it before actually starting the process.

With Any Audio/Video Converter you can convert basically any audio and video file you can think of, in a quite easy process that involves very little effort.

Download Any Audio/Video Converter 5.6 in Softonic

Some players come loaded with too many features and too many codecs - not MPCStar. MPCStar is a universal video player that can play most formats of films downloaded from the internet. MPCStar has been developed using open source libraries, so it's highly customisable if you have any programming knowledge. One of the best features however is a pop-up blocker which prevents pop-ups appearing that sometimes come loaded with films.

To ensure smooth playback and not get weighed down with too many codecs, MPCStar contains only the major codecs including Media Player Classic, FFDshow Codec Pack,
RealPlayer Codecs, ActiveX controls, QuickTime Codecs and DirectVobSub (a.k.a. VSFilter). The only problem is that these codecs are regularly updated and there appears to be no automatic update function but overall, this is one of the simplest and most powerful players I've tried since VLC player.

Download MPCStar 3.1 in Softonic

Audio/Video To EXE converts audio files and video executables and allows you to send them to another person without having a player and codec. In addition to this primary function, Audio/ Video To EXE also performs conversions between various media formats.

There are two types of conversion offered - EXE and multimedia formats, with a list of tasks and completed quickly. The only drawback of this free version is that you cannot select the sampling frequency and hence the quality of the resulting files. This is a great tool for sending small videos and songs by e-mail, ensuring that the recipient can play the file. Almost all audio/video formats [3GP, AAC, AC3, AIFF, ASF, AVI, EXE, FLAC, FLV, GIF, M1V, M2V, M4V, MOV, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, MPG, NUT, OGG, RA, RM, SWF, VOB, VOC, WAV, WMA, WMV, WV, YUV] are supported. You can even play and convert your executables without a player or a codec. It works as a standalone and the latest version adds M1V, M2V, M4V, and YUV support.

If you love to share clips with someone who's forever having problems with their media player, then Audio/Video to EXE is the answer to your prayers.

Download Audio/Video To Exe 1.5.3.0 in Softonic

As far as open source multimedia entertainment centers go, Elisa is a very impressive effort although it requires a lot of processing power and RAM.

Elisa has an intuitive interface that gives a professional feel and can be used to view both TV streams and most major video formats. You can even access it remotely from another computer if need be. Elisa also makes a pretty good audio player and displays album covers and other band related images as it plays your music in the same way as iTunes does.

Indeed, some of the inspiration for it appears to have come from iTunes although unlike iTunes, it extends itself to photo viewing and even browsing the Internet. The latter two functions are not the strongest areas of the package, although the browser is mainly designed for watching videos.

If you've got plenty of RAM to spare and fancy doing all your multimedia functions under one umbrella, Elisa is a beautifully presented and free open source solution.

Download Elisa 0.5.10 in Softonic

If you have a large collection of videos and a video-capable portable device, this might be the perfect app for you.

ImTOO MPEG Encoder Ultimate provides you with a straightforward tool to convert video files between a wide array of formats, with special attention to mobile devices, handheld consoles and multimedia players such as iPod, iPhone, iRiver and Zune. All supported formats are saved as profiles that you simply choose from a drop-down list, though you can also create your own format profiles by tweaking a few settings.

Besides converting, ImTOO MPEG Encoder Ultimate includes some extra tools with which you preview the video, take a snapshot, add special effects, trim the image or even add a watermark to it. Too bad the program was so unstable during our tests: it crashed every now and then without any apparent reason.

Despite these crashes, ImTOO MPEG Encoder Ultimate is a very complete video converting tool that well deserves a try.

Download ImTOO MPEG Encoder 5.0.9.9 Ultimate in Softonic

Have you ever wanted to search for and download your favourite videos without using your browser? Free FLV Converter lets you automatically access sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Google and Metacafé without opening anything else.

You can search by keyword and preview each video found in the rather basic interface and also download them in FLV format. After that, you can convert the files to AVI, IPod, IPhone, 3GP or PSP format. It also works vice versa and if the files in question are already in FLV format, it can convert to DivX, Xvid, MPEG, DVD and AVI with automatic HTML embed links. This means you can paste them into your website or blog to share instantly with the world. If you don't require these functions, the program interface still provides a convenient search platform because you can browse and watch videos at the same time. With just one click, you can download the video you are previewing. For ease of use, it allows you to create a download list of videos you want to save. Once it's complete, you can just leave the program to download the videos whilst you get on with something else although unfortunately, it still doesn't support batch downloading.

A very useful application for those who are not content with only having videos on the Internet but also want them on their hard drive but don't want to visit each video content site seperately.

Download Free FLV Converter 5.6 in Softonic

With multimedia portable devices growing in popularity and features, it's not surprising that DVD ripping tools like Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate have started to offer support for them so that you can take your favorite movies anywhere with you.

Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate is one of those applications: a full featured DVD ripper than can extract all data inside your DVD movies and convert it right away to another video format, including the most popular ones and – of course – video formats for mobile devices such as the iPod, the iPhone and the PSP.

Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate lets you choose the video size, image quality and audio quality, and also create and use different profiles according to the target format or device. Also, Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate lets you trim specific video fragments, edit video effects, adjust subtitles and even add a watermark so that you obtain fully customized DVD video and audio files.

Additionally, Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate can help you clip video segment, crop video size, edit video effects, adjust subtitle, and add video watermark, to get the customized DVD audio and video files.

In addition to ripping the whole DVD, you can also select specific chapters and convert only those. The whole process is done via drop-down menus and Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate is generally very easy to use.

With Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate you can rip the contents of your favorite DVD movies and convert them to different formats – including mobile video - in just a few easy steps.

Download Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate 5.0.40.0729 in Softonic

Convert your video files into Flash FLV format using the FLV Hosting Encoder. FLV is a "Flash Live Video" file. It is a format that is designed for web playback, offering high rates of compression The Flash Player browser plugin can play an FLV, but the FLV must be either embedded in or linked to a SWF. That means, you can't just put the actual FLV on an HTML page. You can however reference the FLV file using action script and SWF

Download FLV Encoder 3.6.0.0 in Softonic

Any FLV Player is a standalone freeware to play FLV (MPEG-4 encoded video file for Flash) files. With Any FLV Player, you can easily play your FLV videos as it doesn't require the complicated Flash authoring tool and Flash development tools. Compared with other FLV players, this FLV player tool can help you post video files to website or BLOG with clicks. You can use the Publish to Web feature to easily integrate any videos to your website. In addition, the FLV meta information injection feature easily enables you to add the FLV meta data to FLV video files.

Fully customized play control panel

If you want to play any video clips on your own website or blog, you need a FLV player Flash object, or a SWF FLV player. At the same time, you need the SWF FLV player to match your website color scheme. Any FLV player is so cool because you can adjust the color of each part to match your website. You can select your own color for the control panel, play/pause button, time display, play position slide etc. You can decide to put the control bar on the top or bottom of the video.

Publish your FLV video to website with a few clicks

It requires some coding work while you want to integrate video playback on your website. you need to know some basic knowledge about FLASH or XML etc. However, with Any FLV Player, you can playback video on your website with a few mouse clicks. Don't need any coding skills.

Automatically inject FLV video meta information

The Macromedia Flash 8 FLV Playback component functions best when your .flv contains valid metadata,however, some FLV encoder doesn't output the metadata. With Any FLV Player, the FLV metadata will be automatically injected to your FLV video file, including playback duration, audio, video information etc. So the visitor of your website will get better playback effect with the metaData injected video file.

Download Any FLV Player 2.1.1 in Softonic

We've all enjoyed the offerings on the video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google Video. Unfortunately, none of these sites provide a standardized method to download and save these videos to your own PC.

YouRipper is the only stand-alone software application to enable users to easily download videos from these sites and save them as an industry standard Flash Movie (FLV). It supports downloading from the following websites: YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Daily Motion and Guba.

With YouRipper, webmasters, bloggers and MySpace hosts can easily embed videos from YouTube etc into their own web pages. And instead of using the uncustomizable and heavily branded video players offered by YouTube, you can select to use a fully customizable, generic video player.

Download YouRipper 2.40 in Softonic

If there's a Youtube video you like, why not take it with you all the time, no matter where you are?

This is what you'll be able to do with Plato FLV to Video Audio Converter, a video conversion tool that has been especially developed to convert FLV videos (that is, the format most online videos are published as) to other popular formats used in the majority of portable devices these days. The program also supports other formats though.

Plato FLV to Video Audio Converter includes a built-in player where you can preview videos before converting them to the selected target format. The good thing about this program is that all supported formats are available as device profiles, meaning that if you want to convert a video for your iPhone, you don't have to fiddle with strange settings like audio bitrate, sample rate, video size or frame rate: you simply select the iPhone profile. However, those users who prefer to be in control of every single detail can also tweak those settings by themselves.

Plato FLV to Video Audio Converter was quite fast during our tests and did a good job in conversions. I guess the only thing this program needs is a somewhat urgent interface redesign.

With Plato FLV to Video Audio Converter you can easily convert FLV videos and other formats so that you can carry them around in your portable device.

Download Plato FLV to Video Audio Converter 7.76 in Softonic

Have you ever wondered how to download videos from Youtube without having to go through the pain of searching the browser's cache or using a complicated third-party app?

The answer is Free Video Zilla, a download manager that monitors the browser in the background and lets you download any video that's embedded on any website you visit. It works with all the main browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Maxthon and Netscape, and even enables you to configure a custom browser.

Free Video Zilla works in a very simple way: just browse video websites like you would normally do and the program will automatically grab all embedded videos and show them on its interface. Now you only have to click on those you want to download, making sure you do it before the waiting list times out.

This easy process has two sides to it: on the one hand the program doesn't require any complicated configuration and downloads videos really fast; on the other hand, as Free Video Zilla monitors the browser, it grabs pretty much anything embedded on the website, and this can sometimes make it a bit difficult to distinguish the video you want to download from the rest of them. Plus, videos are saved only in FLV format so you'll need an FLV player to view them.

With Free Video Zilla you won't have to worry about configuring a third-party to download online videos; simply browse your favorite online video website and the program will take care of everything!

Download Free Video Zilla 1.1.2 in Softonic

YouTube is undoubtedly the biggest video site on the internet and one of these business success stories of the decade.

However, with copyrighted content increasingly being removed, the only way to save your favourite clips is to download them onto your hard drive. YouTube Downloader is a software that helps you download videos instantly and convert them into other video formats. The program is incredibly easy to use - just specify the URL for the video you want to download and click the Ok button. It also allows you to convert downloaded videos for Ipod, Iphone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, XVid and MP3 which is useful for taking your films on the move. The converter is a bit slow but it's a nice add on to have. One problem you may have is that when you've downloaded the clip, you may have no sound. This is easily remedied by downloading a codec which can be found on the developer website.

For those worried about the disappearance of their favourite clips from YouTube or those that just want an archive, YouTube Downloader is an ultra easy to use and efficient option.

Download YouTube Downloader 2.1.6 in Softonic

In an age of multiple media players all with different codecs and formats, it's nice to know there's at least one out there that can play just about anything.

Haihaisoft Universal Player supports almost all popular digital media formats and can also play digital media files protected by DRM-X. Amongst the players it can emulate are Windows Media Player, Real Player, Adobe Flash Player, Apple QuickTime Player, PowerDVD and Flash Video (FLV) Player. Whatsmore though, this player embeds itself into Internet Explorer meaning that whenever you are presented with a format compatible with any of these file types, you can watch it instantly. The number of formats it can play is mind-boggling, including those protected by DRM such as WMV(Windows Media Video), WMA(Windows Media Audio), ASF, WMS, DVD, VCD, SVCD, MOV, RM, RMVB, AVI, MPEG, WMV, 3GP, FLV, SWF, MP3, AMR, M4A, ACC, OGG, MIDI, GIF and JPEG file format. Best of all, the program is constantly updated with the latest codecs so you don't need to worry about it suddenly not being able to play files.

A completely free player that supports just about any format imaginable and embeds itself into IE perfectly.

Download Haihaisoft Universal Player 1.0.7.1 in Softonic

Sothink FLV Player is a small-sized and easy-to-use FLV Player that allows you to enjoy videos downloaded in Flash format from sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion.

Simply double-click on FLV files or drag and drop them into the window of FLV Player and you can enjoy flash videos offline at any time. The image quality is generally excellent compared to some FLV players although obviously much depends on what state it was in when you downloaded it originally. The program is particularly useful for travellers who don't have constant access to the internet but want to watch YouTube videos for playback later. It's also remarkably powerful supporting everything from videos downloaded on DailyMotion, YouTube and Google Video to those that embedded in blogs and websites. Although it's not often a major issue, note that Sothink FLV Player also does not require installation of the .NET framework to work. Although there are few controls available, you can stretch the screen to whatever size you want although with YouTube videos, this often means that the quality goes down.

Amazingly lightweight and easy to use, Sothink FLV Player is a great option for those video fans on the move.

Download Sothink FLV Player 2.1 Build 71029 in Softonic

Replay Media Catcher is smart - it figures out the name of the video or MP3 file you've recorded, and names the file automatically. This makes it easier than ever to organize your recorded media. For MP3 files, the artist, album, song title and other information are added to the ID3 tags - this makes your recorded songs appear as they should in iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other program that plays MP3 files.

Features:

• Record all kinds of FLV format Flash Videos
• Capture streaming MP3 files
• Automatically names songs and video files
• One click recording
• MP3 tag editor
• Works great for hard-to-capture sites using RTMP protocol

Download Replay Media Catcher 2.30 in Softonic

It's great to have a portable multimedia device such as a PSP, an iPod or a Zune to watch movies on the go. The problem comes when you need to convert those videos from the PC to a suitable format so that you can watch those videos while commuting or traveling.

Koyote Free Video Converter can help you handle this issue in a very simple way. Far from complicated, bloated converting tools, this easy app lets you convert videos in a snap. You can choose between a wide range of formats, including those which are used in all popular portable devices. Available formats are presented as profiles with set preferences, but you can easily tweak them to suit your preferences.

Koyote Free Video Converter includes a small video window, but sadly it's only intended to watch video frames as the conversion process is working. It would have been nice to be able to use it also as video player to preview the contents of the movie before converting it.

With Koyote Free Video Converter you can easily convert videos to a variety of formats, including those suitable for portable devices.

Download Koyote Free Video Converter 1.2 in Softonic

FLVPlay is an AIR-based software app that provides you with a whole new interface from which to browse and view Youtube videos, plus saving them to your hard drive.

So what's the point of having a different Youtube interface? First, you can now watch online videos without a web browser, which makes it lighter on resources. Second, FLVPlay features a much nicer design and therefore makes the whole user experience much better, and finally you get access to some extra features like the ability to show more thumbnails than the original website or, more important, the possibility to save videos right to your hard drive in FLV format.

But FLVPlay is not all advantages. On the downside, it seemed to be a bit slower than Youtube when loading videos, especially after watching the first one. This first video loads in a snap but then the program takes a while to change to the next one.

FLVPlay is an attractive AIR Youtube player that may be a bit slow at times, but which also lets you save videos in FLV format to your hard drive.

Download FLVPlay 1.09 in Softonic