How can I make FLV (Flash Video) files?

Update #3: Subtitle: “How can I make FLV with freeware / opensource software” or “How can I make FLV for free!”

For creating FLV I use Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder. I use it professionally (it’s part of Flash 8 Professional) but I understand that not everybody is able to get hold of this program.

How can we create FLV without an expensive program?

You can use Riva FLV Encoder. This freeware program can be use to encode AVI, MPEG, Quicktime and WMV to FLV.
The same company also has a free Riva FLV Player which yoube used to play your FLV files.
Update #4: A program similar to Riva FLV Encoder is FLV Encoder from Digitalgroover.
It’s easy to use but for some reason I can’t get it to work with my computer at home (“Fail to transcode file!”), it works fine with the computer at work.
It’s freeware and they also have a FLV Player which is able to view and repair MetaData.

You can also use the FLV Player by Martijn de Visser for playing FLV.

Both FLV players come with their own installer so you can associate FLV files with one of these programs.

Update #2: VLC media player can also play FLV (and many more) but it seems to be an undocumented feature. And for some reason it doesn’t play all FLV files.

And of course you should use my FLV player for playing video on your site.

This is all too easy, is there more?

The new FLV encoders translate video in the correct manner to FLV. But sometimes you find FLV files that don’t have metadata. Metadata is invisible information hidden in FLV, and in some cases it’s not.
This metadata is used to set the position or the playhead, or the dimension of the FLV, and so on.

To put metadata into a FLV file you can use FLVMDI (FLV MetaData Injector)
FLVMDI is free to use, but you can’t distribute it. It looks very intimidating; [it’s a command line application] but there’s also a GUI which makes our lives much easier.

Furthermore I have found two encoders which should also be able to create FLV.
SUPER (freeware)
and
MediaCoder (open source)
But I haven’t had enough time to explore the possibilities of these programs.
SUPER can make FLV files but uses a SWF as a container and I can’t find anything to can turn this off.
Update #1: The new version of SUPER can make FLV without SWF, but the quality is not great, at least not as good as Riva FLV Encoder.

I have made FLV with MediaCoder but it’s three times more kB than the FLV I made with Riva FLV Encoder…
I haven’t found the correct settings yet.