Recommend stand alone media player that supports FLV files?

[peggypwr1]

Any stand alone media players (liek WD TV) that can play FLV files from youtube , daily motion, etc w/o conversion on the market today?

[rwmol]

Yes. Media Play Classic - Home Cinema. If you want a media player that downloads .flv, Real Player.

[Ai Haibara]

peggypwr1 is referring to stand-alone media players that hook up to a TV, like the WDTV, or that you can take with you.

[peggypwr1]

Ye snot software but hardware to hook up to the boob tube.

[_Al_]

I thing Boxee Box can, it is Intel based, WDTV is Sigma based, it cannot decode flv.

[jagabo]

Note that FLV can contain several different video and audio codecs. h.264, vp6, sorrenson spark, mp3, aac, etc. Even players that will support FLV files probably won't play all of them.

The WDTV Live (I don't know about the newer versions) doesn't play FLV files locally. But it does play videos directly from Youtube. I don't know if it's playing the FLV versions or the MP4 versions.

It looks like the Boxee Box only plays VP6 in FLV.
http://support.boxee.tv/entries/329330-what-are-the-technical-specifications-of-the-boxee-box

[rwmol]

peggypwr1 is referring to stand-alone media players that hook up to a TV, like the WDTV, or that you can take with you.

Oops. 66 year old brain fade. How about this. Pretty cool:

http://uebo.net/products/m100

[jagabo]

How about this. Pretty cool:

http://uebo.net/products/m100

I don't see support for VP6.

Look here for info on more players: http://www.iboum.com/

Unfortunately, the chipsets (Realtek and Sigma) used in most players don't support VP6.

[yoda313]

But it does play videos directly from Youtube. I don't know if it's playing the FLV versions or the MP4 versions.

I don't know if this happens to the wdtv live as well or if it is just for the 360 but there are video clips from youtube that won't play on the xbox 360. It says content restricted or some such thing. Apparently this is some way to restrict viewing when not on a regular computer. EDit - and I had parental rating disabled or at its lowest setting so I don't think that was it.

I don't know if this is inherent only to the new youtube app on the 360 or if other settop boxes with youtube support also restrict certain clips. Might be an issue down the road.

Another option is to remux the flvs to a mp4 or mkv file if its h264 and the particular box doesn't like the original flv file. Winff can do this. However I don't know about vp6 support. That might have to be reencoded for any settop player.

[Seeker47]

I thing Boxee Box can, it is Intel based, WDTV is Sigma based, it cannot decode flv.

Yes, no joy here with my WD Live and the flv files I've tried. (I think .Mov is another 'No Go.')

I have seen a few -- possibly mis-labeled (?) -- .Avi files that would not play, but then they did play after I renamed them as .MP4. (That was on the basis of what I saw, codec-wise, when inspecting the file header.) Even some versions of .WMV do not play. Still, I think if you look at the comparative reviews, the WD probably plays more file types than the competition.

I have also used one or another of the video-file-type-conversion programs to be found here in the Tools section. This tends to work but also to introduce some deficit: either PQ suffers, the image AR changes, or (fairly common) the ability to FF or Rew in the converted file is lost. One way this can often be avoided is to run the file through processing by AVStoDVD, but moving it to DVD format this way takes time and then the convenience of just using the portable player is lost.

[_Al_]

With " avi" it is similar like with flv. Inside there could be more type of videos with different codecs encoded. Inside avi there could be, DivX, XviD and for example DV avi. DV avi from our older camcorders cannot be decoded also by Sigma or Realtek.

[peaceDOThuxDOTde]

nowadays there are almost always is x264 in a flv. so even if the player not supports the container it woudl be really fast to put the video-audio stream into another container.

"old" flv files often confatin some flash codec VP-6 or whatever it is called. i have no ideo of hardware players but i guess they more likeley will have problems with that. anyway i would not make it about flv what player i buy.

[teodz1984]

Sometimes repackaging the container helps on the WDTV...
I had an AVI that couldn't play on my WDTV Live Hub.. (Seems their AVI spec is very strict. )
I just remux the whole thing in a MKV container... took obnly a few seconds (no recoding necessary)
The file played afterwards