The purpose of this guide is to show how to convert flash video (flv) videos to more common formats like avi, wmv, etc. Flv files are common when downing videos off sites like youtube, dailymotion, etc. It's an annoying format, for ease of use, it's much better to convert it to more common video formats like avi. Who wants to use flv player over VLC or XBMC? This guide will allow flv files to be converted and played with the users' media player of choice. Total Video Converter is a pay app. Another app which will work for converting flv files is Winavi. Winavi is also a pay app. Total Video Converter has a much higher success rate in my experience, though Winavi will work for flv conversion most of the time.

What's Required:

Total Video Converter: http://www.effectmatrix.com/total-vi...ter/tvc310.exe

Flv Player (not required, but useful for viewing flv videos prior to conversion): http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FLV_Player.htm

1. Open Total Video Converter.



2. Click new task and select import files from the menu.



3. Browse to the flv files to be converted and hold shift and left click to highlight all that ones that are going be converted. Click open. If it's a single file, just double click it. Note: Total Video Converter works great for batch converting flv files, so don't be shy about batch conversion.



4. This menu will appear. Select an output format. In this example, I select mjpeg avi from the menu.



5. The encoding menu will appear. Select a profile from the profile box, I select high quality here.



6. Be sure to check all the files to be encoded in the task list box. A couple other options are selectable, best to leave the settings to default unless the user knows what they're doing. The default output directory for Total Video Converter is Program Files-->Total Video Converter-->Converted. Change as needed. Click convert now when all the options are set.



7. The video will now be converted to the selected format. This should only take a short time, depending on the number of videos being converted.



8. An explorer window will pop up showing the converted files. Enjoy the converted files with your media player of choice!

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Awesome tut LS, this can help me with Happy Tree Friends!!

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Thanks. It's very simple, but it actually took me several hours and apps before I found a program which would convert flv to XBMC friendly formats with ease and a good success rate. XBMC does in fact play flv files, but trying to scroll forward and back will cause the video to crash in my build.

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Yeah same with my build. Flash files just refuse to play, the only format that i have noticed that has issues with XBMC. I for one appreciate the tut, and will post back when i do the conversion.

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Good tut LS - will keep this in mind if I run across any .flv files, thanks

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You do know there are DVD torrents of it , Nice tutorial LS! I would also want to recommend, Xilisoft Video Converter 3 to convert <Anything> to <Anything>

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thanks LS, have a bunch of flvs and hate the FLV standalone player

This is great. I just stumbled across this when I was reading the tut on using a firefox plugin to download flv files from sites. I've been downloading a lot of flv's a wmv's and found this program to be incredible in converting to AVI's. I did find one problem though. I would download 6 or more off a page, and 1 or 2 of them sometimes did not convert to AVI. Not a bad problem, since I figured out that I can choose other formats and they will work. For all the ones that didn't work, I chose DivX AVI and it worked, or lol=ssless AVI and it worked. Anyway, just mantioning this for anyone who had trouble converting the flv. It's not the program. It's most likely the person who made the flv.

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Yeah sometimes the flv's can be goofy. Total Video Convertor is a great program, but sometimes it just won't to the job. It's definitely something with the flv files themselves. 99% of the time either Total Video Convertor or Winavi will do the job. The other 1% are just problem files. I've found another great use for Total Video Convertor. It's great for encoding video to audio, especially mp3. If you find a cool song on youtube that may not be available anywhere else, voila.

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