"Is there any free FLV player to play FLV files on my Windows 8 computer? I downloaded videos from YouTube and I need a fast, easy to use, lightweight flv player freeware to play FLV files?"

It's quite common for people to have such kind of problems. Developed by Adobe Systems, Flash Video is the dominant web video format widely adopted by online video sites including YouTube, Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, and Reuters.com. If you download online FLV videos and want to play FLV files locally on your computer, you can't do without the FLV player. As we all know that Windows Media Player could hardly recognize FLV files and play FLV files. If you want to learn how to play FLV files, you could visit the post 3 Ways to Play FLV Files. However, in this post, we would like to share with you the 6 best free FLV player software. With these best free FLV player software apps, you could easily solve the problems on how to play.FLV video. These FLV players would offer the best and free solutions to help you easily play FLV files from YouTube or other sources on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10.

Part 1: Introduction to FLV

Flash Live Video, known as FLV, is used to deliver video content over the Internet to a user's computer. The .flv file format allows for high rates of file compression while retaining a superior video quality, which makes possible that the file creators can keep the file sizes manageable and make it easier for viewers to watch .flv videos online.

Part 2: 6 Best Free FLV Player Software for Windows

1. Leawo Blu-ray Player

Leawo Blu-ray Player, a free alternative of Windows Media Player, lets you enjoy not only common/HD movies and audios in various formats on your computer, but also Blu-ray movies and DVD movies in disc or folder. It offers permanent free service to play FLV files on PC in high quality, no matter your source FLV videos are from YouTube or other sources. It's a totally free video player that could play back videos and audios in various formats on Windows like videos in AVI, MPEG, WMV, MP4, FLV, RM, MOV, Xvid, 3GP, HD MP4, HD AVI, HD MOV, HD TS, etc., and audios in AAC, AC3, MP3, M4A, MKA, WAV, WMA, etc. What's more, it could be used as an extremely wonderful Blu-ray media player to play back Blu-ray and DVD discs in the market. It is compatible with all Windows OS computers, including Windows XP/7/8/8.1/10. It delivers lossless quality video and audio, with subtitles, audio tracks, video effects and audio effects adjustable.

    Free Blu-ray Player

    – Region-free Blu-ray player software to play Blu-ray disc and DVD disc for free, regardless of disc protection and region restriction.
    – Play 4K FLV videos, 4K MKV videos, 4K MP4 videos, etc. without quality loss.
    – Play 1080P videos, 720P videos with lossless quality.

2. KMplayer

A minimalistic, user-friendly and functional interface, all the options are available to you on right click in the main window which gives access to the players' extensive features. The player offers quick playback and a fully skinnable interface that change upon every new playing track. It's simple enough to use for an average person but don't be deceived by its simplicity, it offers a powerhouse of configuration options and its strong user base and its active official forum helps you out whenever you run into a problem with the player.

For media playback, it includes almost all the essential decoders required built-in. Additionally, KMP also supports 3rd party codecs and also doesn't install the codecs on the computer as other codecs do. Most public codec packs+players forces codecs to register on your computer, while KMP does not. This means that installing KMP will not affect your computer at all.KMPlayer used to be my top pick until recently I found PotPlayer, but nothing stops me from using this advanced media player. KMPlayer gets a special mention though, feature-wise outwitting every other media player in its category.

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3. JetVideo Player

JetVideo is a comprehensive multimedia player for Windows PC users. If you're a frequent watcher of videos on your computer, you probably know just how many different file formats videos can come in. Sometimes it can be difficult to find a multimedia player that supports the format of the video you want to watch at a given time.

JetVideo is a solution to this issue. The developers claim that JetVideo can play a video in nearly any format, and it seems to be pretty accurate. JetVideo can play videos in AVI, MPG, MPEG, ASF, WMV, AVI and DIVX just to name a few. As an added bonus, Jet Video can also play a variety of different formats of audio files.

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4. Any FLV Player

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.

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5. VLC Player

As VLC announced on its official site, VLC Media Player (short for VLC) is a free and open-source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but since VLC is no longer simply a client, that initialize no longer applies. It is one of the most platform-independent media players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU, Linux, BeOS, and BSD.

VLC is popular for its ability to play the video content of incomplete, unfinished, or damaged video downloads before the files have been fully downloaded (e.g. files still downloading via BitTorrent, eMule, or Gnutella). It also plays m2t MPEG transport streams (.TS) files while they are still being digitized from an HDV camera via a FireWire cable, making it possible to monitor the video as it is being played. This is because it is a packet-based player. The player also has the ability to use libcdio to access .iso files so that the user can play files on a disk image, even if the user's operating system does not have the capability of working directly with .iso images.

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6. FreeSmith Video Player

FreeSmith Video Player, also known as MKV Video Player, is a 100% free FLV Player. This FLV video player can play most popular videos such as (SD) video formats (including AVI, MPEG, WMV, DivX, MP4, XviD, 3GP, FLV) and high-definition (HD) formats (like MPEG2-TS, AVCHD, MKV, etc). FreeSmith Video Player also empowers you to enjoy audio files such as MP3 freely!

The FLV Video Player an all-in-one media player to play videos, music, online videos and even DVD, Blu-ray disc movies free for everyone. More importantly, a newbie can use this free FLV Video Player at ease. With this free FLV player, you can input your favorite videos, edit and save them freely. All basic functions like play, pause, seek, full screen, skin, settings are available.

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Part 3: How to Play FLV Files with Leawo Blu-ray Player

What player will play .flv files can be answered with the above mentioned 6 players, which are perfect for playing your FLV files smoothly? Among them, I prefer Leawo Blu-ray Player the most due to the convenience and powerful features it provides so I will show a step-by-step guide to let you play FLV files with Leawo Blu-ray Player here.

Step 1: Install the player free. Click the button below to download and install the free player to your PC.

Step 2: Add the source FLV files to the player. After launching the player on your Windows, click Open File to load the source FLV files to the player.

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Step 3: Set the playback options.Click on the gear icon to enter the settings pane, where you can set playback options such as subtitles, view mode, brightness and contrast, and so on. Do the settings based on your preference.

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Step 4: Play the FLV files. After all settings are done, click on the exact file to play from the playlist.

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Part 4: Convert FLV Format if Your Player Can't Support FLV - Leawo Video Converter

Now that you have received a lot of information on "how do I play an .flv file" and know quite a few FLV players that are dedicated for FLV playback. Imagine that if you do have problems with these FLV files, just like monsters, you can consider converting them to other common video formats, for example MP4.

Leawo Video Converter is a very good choice here for you. This is a fundamental program being developed to convert videos from one format to another. It covers more than 180 video/audio formats by total, and provides 6x higher speed for video conversion. Best of all, it can retain exactly 100%of original file quality without making any compromise on quality loss after file conversion. By the way, it is handy to use even for beginners so it will only bring satisfaction and enjoyment for you.

   

Part 5: Conclusion

When it comes to how to play .flv files on Windows, you have a lot of solutions to settle this after reading this post. You can either try with FLV players such as Leawo Blu-ray Player or VLC player, or you may find help from third-party video converter, allowing you to convert FLV files to other common video formats. I hope this post helps indeed.