How to play FLV files on a Mac

1. What's FLV
Flash Video (FLV) is a file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player (initially produced by Macromedia) versions 6–10. Until version 9 update 2 of the Flash Player, Flash Video referred to a proprietary file format, having the extension FLV. Notable users of the Flash Video format include YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Reuters.com, metacafe, and many other news providers.

2. What’s the difference between FLV and SWF
FLV stands for “Flash Video”. It is a format designed for web video playback that offers high rates of compression and produces high quality video. FLV is becoming more and more popular on the web since it can easily be embedded in a webpage and is supported by the main operating systems via the Adobe Flash Player and web-browser plug in. At present, FLV is the file format widely used by some famous websites, such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, etc.

More specifically, SWF is a proprietary file format for multimedia and especially for vector graphics. It contains animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function in order to be small enough for publication on the Web. Therefore, SWF is currently the dominant format for displaying animated vector graphics on the web which is very popular and be commonly used. What's more, SWF is sometimes used for creating animated display graphics and menus for DVD movies, and television commercials.

3. How to play FLV on a Mac
An FLV player is a type of media player that is used for playing flash video from PC as well as from Internet websites. An FLV player can be used standalone, without the need of the Adobe Flash authoring or developmental tools.
The following players support FLV files in their default installations:
VLC player
Mplayer OS X