Introduction

Given the popularity and ease of video sharing websites, we find ourselves with more and more flv files. My 3-yr old son has discovered YouTube - don't ask me how many times I have heard 'Lion Sleeps Tonight' and 'Pigloo - Ca Plane Pour Moi' [and he does not even know French !].

Anyway I tried searching for flv editors. Did not find too many that did not require conversion of format to edit. So decided to add some support in Movica [which if you haven't noticed is just a user interface for command line utilities]. However, the command line editors for flv have not evolved too much as yet. Found a goodish tool called flvtool and with some good amount of experimentation I think we have a usable method. Flvtool is meant to edit metadata of flv movies. If you are trying to do that sort of thing, I would strongly recommend you take a closer look at it. Sadly, none of that functional richness is available through Movica currently.

Prerequisites

This is what you have to have.

  • ffdshow - This is an open source DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing several video formats. If you have installed any codec pack, you almost certainly have this. 
  • FLV Splitter - This is an open source project (God bless SourceForge). It is a directShow filter that allows Movica to play the flv movie for us to make the selections. It does not used in the actual editing later.  

Downloading and Installing prerequisite software

Install the ffdshow that you can download from this link or alternatively from here.

The next thing is the flv splitter. I think I got the splitter through a 'codec pack'. If you want you can download it from SourceForge and install just that.

If you decide to take the DIY route (i.e. without a codec pack) you will get a file with and extension of .ax

Please use this very useful guide on installing this on your computer

Configuring Movica

Thankfully you will need to do nothing to configure Movica to start using this. When Movica starts it will check to see if the splitter is installed and enable the feature. If you already have Movica running and would rather not restart it, check the 'Enable this tool' box on 'Add Tools' tab.

Playing edited FLV movies

I would have listed all the specialised flv players here but since you already have the flv splitter installed on your computer by this point, you can play flv movies in most media players on Windows - e.g. Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, etc -- even Movica ;)

Of course, you always have VLC player.