Play FLV flash videos with XNView and ffdshow - how?

Phil · Post by **Phil** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 2:34 am

I've seen posts referring to using ffdshow to view FLV flash videos in XNView.

I've got the latest versions of XNView and ffdshow installed but XNView still won't play FLV files (or even show a thumbnail).

Obviously there's some setup thing that I have to do to get XNView to display FLV files, but I have no idea what that is. So far I can't see that ffdshow is doing anything, so maybe I didn't set ffdshow up right.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Brian · Post by **Brian** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 5:06 am

If your ffdshow is set up correctly, this should work:

Go to 'Tools/Options/File List'

In the second custom 'Custom Files' box, add FLV. (don't forget to click the checkbox!)

Phil · Post by **Phil** » Sun Apr 13, 2008 8:15 pm

OK, I didn't have ffdshow set up correctly - it turns out that it also requires something called flvsplitter to be installed.

I've now done that and FLV videos play perfectly in XNView.

The difficulty is the lack of documentation for ffdshow - I only found out how to do it by trawling through other forums until I found the solution:

1. Download and install ffdshow (I used the default settings)

2. Download flvsplitter.zip, extract flvsplitter.ax to any folder (I put it in 'C:\FLVSplitter\') and register the file with Windows by running regsvr32.exe - in my case the command was 'regsvr32 C:\FLVSplitter\FLVSplitter.ax'.

After that FLV videos played in XNView - when ffdshow is active a couple of icons appear in the Windows taskbar tray.