FLV Converter – A Freeware to Convert FLV Videos to AVI

Mahendra Palsule — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:01:26 +0000

The Flash FLV video format has become the default format for video on the web. Many popular video websites like YouTube, Google Videos, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and Yahoo! Videos use the FLV video format. Meanwhile, most Windows desktop video programs used to play and edit videos use the Microsoft AVI file format. As a result, many users frequently need freware to convert FLV videos found on the web to AVI format on the desktop.

In this article, let us look at Free FLV Converter, a simple freeware application you can use to convert FLV videos to AVI.

Free FLV Converter is developed by Koyote Soft, and can also be downloaded from CNET Downloads. Free FLV converter can download embedded FLV (or SWF) videos directly from the Internet, and can convert FLV to AVI, iPod (MPEG4 or H.264), iPhone, 3GP, PSP, or MP3 audio only. Conversely, it can also convert videos from other formats (DivX, XviD, MpeG, DVD, and AVI) to FLV.

Installation

Download and run the setup program to install the software. It is a light-weight download at 6MB, compared to most other video converters, and does more than just convert videos as we shall see. The only thing you would want to take care of during installation, is to avoid installing the Dealio toolbar. This is a “bloatware” toolbar that is promoted to support this freeware application, but you can easily opt out of installation by deselecting the two checkboxes during setup. Select your preferred language the first time you launch the program.

Convert FLV To AVI

Let’s say you have already downloaded a video in FLV format to your PC and want to convert it to AVI. On the Free FLV Converter toolbar, click the Conversion from FLV button.

This will bring up a Select File Dialog from which you should select the FLV video file you wish to convert. A conversion window opens up showing the file to be converted at the top, and settings to be used for the conversion at the bottom. Click the Convert button at the bottom to convert the file.

You can customize the conversion settings if you wish. You can choose the output format, output quality, and location of the output video file in the Output configuration section. The video and audio sections allow you to set advanced settings for the codec, frame rate, aspect ratio, bit rate, etc. The default settings work fine if you don’t want to dive into technical details.

From this dialog itself, you can click the “+” button at the top to add more files to convert multiple videos in batch mode. The program shows you a preview while converting. The speed of conversion is quite fast, and the program did not slow down my PC or interfere with other applications, thus working very efficiently.

Convert To FLV

In much the same way as converting FLV to other formats, you can also use Free FLV Converter to convert other video formats to FLV. Just click the Conversion to FLV button on the toolbar, select the file to convert, and you get a FLV file that you can embed on your website. You also get a HTML webpage created automatically with the embedded video.

Search Videos

You can use Free FLV Converter to search for videos on popular video sharing websites without opening your browser. Click the Search button on the toolbar to search for videos. You can select websites like YouTube, Google, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc. from the Site drop-down list, enter your search terms, and click Search.

The search results are shown in the right pane. You can play, download, or go to that video’s page on the site. You can multi-select and download multiple videos at once.

Download Videos

If you already know the URL for a certain video that you wish to download, click the Tube downloader button on the toolbar. Here you can enter the URL of the video page that you wish to download.

You can also load a text file containing a list of URLs of videos you want to download.

For a freeware application, Free FLV Converter’s feature set is very impressive. Are you familiar with any other freeware FLV to AVI converter? Share with us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

Related posts

How To Easily Convert Video Files to DVD, MP4, VCD, MPEG, AVI … with VideoSpiritLite

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:01:59 +0000

I have used MANY video converters over the years. DVD to MPG or DVD to AVI and then I needed to convert AVI to WMV and many other combinations. Every time I was forced to find a different application to convert my damn video files! It was pretty annoying.

So when I happed upon VideoSpiritLite and saw that it could convert video files from and to any of these formats, VCD / SVCD / DVD / MPEG / AVI / DivX/ASF / WMV/DAT / SWF / FLV / 3GP / RM / MP4 / MOV, I was pretty happy and I hadn’t even downloaded the application yet.

While I started downloading the LITE version that is free from here I read through its features and it does some really neat stuff, other than converting, like extracting audio or still pictures from video. They do have a PRO version that costs money the only difference between the two products is the ability to edit the videos. Let’s take a look at what we can do with the free version.

The download was 10.9MB and once I downloaded it, I extracted the exe file and started installing. When it was completed in about 45 seconds it launched the application. You will see an info box when the application starts, prompting you to check that you have each of these three codec packs installed. They are K-lite which I wrote about here, Real Alternative and Quick Time.

With these three codec packs you can convert video files to and from any of the above formats for free! If you do not have any of them installed follow their respective links to grab and install them. I had all of them installed on my system so I was good to go.

Once you complete that, you will click close and you will then see the application. It looks like this:

I know, I know, you want to see how to convert a video file… So here we go. Start with Add Task

Then I chose Convert One File and that brings up the Wizard to get your video converted. Just fill out the fields

I chose the type I want to convert my video to, then I chose the input video and it automatically gives you the most reasonable settings but, if you know what you are doing you can go in and modify most settings.

When you are done hit OK. This will not start the conversion yet. The program can do batch processing – meaning you can set multiple files to convert and then start it. We will just be doing one today though. After you hit OK you will see a task like so:

Hit Start and you are off…

Once the conversion is complete you can view or copy the file from the output folder to where it needs to go. Very easy, and VERY handy!

To use the other features we were talking about it is as simple as going back to Add Task and selecting one of the other options:

You will see options to Split, Join and extract images. You can also convert a DVD. I was not able to figure out how to extract audio only from a video file but their website listed it as a feature. If you figure out how to do it – let us know in the comments!