Here's something I discovered, fairly important for fellow video aficionados, and that's that you can actually watch .flv videos from within Windows Media player (latest one, v11). Am I the only one that this is "news" to? It's an important, better way to watch flvs.

Heck I'd always used the flv players out there to watch flvs on my hard drive... but I found out by simply trying, that you can watch flvs from within the regular windows media player. So now I have that configured as the default application to watch flvs on my computer. I like simplifying things like this.

To do this:
Step 1: Open windows media player (eg by playing any .wmv/mpg/avi).
Step 2: Now choose File/Open and in the bottom drop down menu, change it to say "Any File" instead of the default "Media files (all types)".
Step 3: You're watching the .flv
(but wait it gets better)
Step 4: Now go to windows explorer, and right click on any flv
Step 5: Choose "Open With..." and instead of choosing a program, click on "Choose Program" bottom button
Step 6: Navigate to Windows Media Player in the choices (it wouldn't have appeared yet as a choice, unless you'd first manually navigated to and played an .flv as directed above), and NOW click the checkbox on "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file".

Voila! Now whenever you click on a saved .flv on your hard drive, it'll launch it from Windows Media Player.


For video,

-ken