Reference

FLV (Flash video)

FLV is the Flash Video container that dominated web video in the 2000s, used by early YouTube and many streaming sites. With Adobe Flash discontinued at the end of 2020, FLV is now a deprecated, legacy format.

Files & formatsGeneral

FLV (Flash video)

Also known as: .flv file, Flash video, how to open flv

Flash Video container, popular in the 2000s
Flash was discontinued at the end of 2020
Deprecated; convert to MP4 for modern use

A relic of the Flash era

FLV was designed to deliver video through the Adobe Flash Player, which most websites once relied on for video playback. It typically carried H.263 or H.264 video with MP3 or AAC audio in a lightweight container suited to streaming over the web of its time.

Flash reached end of life at the end of 2020, and browsers no longer support it. FLV files no longer have a native web home, though desktop players like VLC still open them.

The storage angle

Old .flv downloads from the Flash era often linger in folders long after anything can conveniently play them. Because the format is deprecated, the practical move is usually to convert them.

Transcoding FLV to MP4 makes the video playable on modern devices and editors, and can shrink it if the original used older, less efficient compression.

Related terms

Keep reading the reference.

Files & formatsMP4MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is the most common video container format. The .mp4 file holds video, audio, and subtitle streams together, but does not itself define quality — the codec inside (usually H.264 or HEVC) decides how large and how compressed the video is.General Files & formatsContainer formatA container format is the file wrapper that packages compressed video, audio, subtitles, and metadata into one file — for example MP4, MOV, or MKV. It defines how the parts are stored together, not how they are compressed; the codec inside does that.General Storage conceptsVideo codec (H.264 vs H.265/HEVC)A video codec is the method used to compress and decompress video. H.265 (HEVC) is the newer successor to H.264 (AVC) and encodes the same quality in noticeably less space, which is why modern phones record in HEVC to keep video files smaller.General Storage conceptsCompression (lossy vs lossless)Compression shrinks a file by encoding its data more efficiently. Lossless compression rebuilds the original exactly, while lossy compression permanently discards detail the eye or ear is least likely to notice in exchange for much smaller files.General

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Convert video to GIF