Can most computers usually open an flv file?

[grampazero]

Hi,
I'm a newbie and this is a first post. I'm hoping to set up a site where I sell a short video and email the file in flv form. I thought flv was going to be best file type because of the short download time, and also because I thought that Adobe flash was supposedly installed on most computers and would therefore play the file once opened. Just today I tried sending a test file to a couple different people and neither one could open it. It does play on my computer. I would appreciate any light you people could shed on this for me.
thanks alot,
gz

[guns1inger]

You need more than just flash to open the file. Sites that have FLV files also have them embedded inside a flash player. There are dedicated flv players, and some other players, such as The KM Player, support the format. However by default they will not play on a standard Windows (or Mac or Linux) machine. You need a player capable of flv playback as well. You could provide a link to a free player, or you could consider a different format.

FLV is a container. The video inside can be compressed in a number of ways. How are you compressing yours ? If you are using H264 (AVC) compression then you could look at the mp4 container. The file size would be similar, and it would play more easily (W7 supports it in WMP out of the box, anyone with quicktime could play it etc)

[grampazero]

Hi gunsl1nger,
thank you for the reply. I really appreciate it. My head's spinning cause its 3am, so I'm gonna sleep on it!
thanks again,
gz