1. FLV is predominant.
What’s more, websites like youtube make full advantage of FLV video, and make FLV video more and more popular online. The success of youtube indicates growth of video sharing communities and the benefits of using FLV as the video source online: streaming and small size. FLV with a Flash player is not the first to provide streaming service. RM with RealPlayer and MOV with QuickTime are quite popular for online videos, but the file size is an issue for the booming use of online videos. FLV solves this problem and becomes the prominent online video format.
2. FLV is a large resource.
You are getting more and more FLV videos, when you go to a video site, e.g. YouTube, Dailymotion, or a social networking website, e.g. Facebook, MySpace. Some are creative videos, some are episodes from classic TV shows, MTV, and some are promotion trailers.
You may pay attention to the quality of the FLV videos on YouTube.com. Indeed, some of the videos are in poor quality with the size as 320x240 and player size as 480x360, for the sake of the file size and webpage layout. The player now (since November) at YouTube is widescreen with 640x360, however, the video is actually 320x180. Nevertheless, the video quality on site actually mainly depends on the original video.
This is a screenshot of the new player with 640x360.
To use the FLV video as an inspiration to your creative work via Adobe Premiere, Windows Movie Maker, and the like, you may need to get the video to the editing program in the format it supports. AVI is the choice for you. AVI, with Advanced Video Interleave in full term, is a multimedia container format developed by Microsoft. An original AVI video with raw data generally presents high quality, but in big file size.
Convertdirect.com is free for you to convert FLV to AVI with two compressed video codec, DviX and Xvid. Getting YouTube to AVI is no longer a difficult task. If you have problem playing the AVI generated by convertdirect.com, you shall install the related codec: DivX from http://www.divx.com/divx/play/ and XviD from http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Nic_XviD_Codec.htm.