I am not overly knowledgeable about video formats and am having difficulties converting a .flv video to an .AVI format that poser can read. I have now used several conversion programs with no success. Every video player I put it in will read it as .avi, but poser won't display it. I know I have it plugged into the right spot because I have tested it with .avi files I have made in Poser and a few other avis I have downloaded. I have read that there are many variations of .avi files and I was wondering which ones Poser can read and if there are any free conversion softwares available to do the job. Apparently VLC player can convert to .avi, but I don't know what video and audio formats to use. Any help on this would be great. Thank you.

Try uncompressed frames and no audio.

The audio probably won't matter.  I don't think Poser reads the audio channel.

Yeah, the audio isn't really important. I just tried it without the audio, but poser still won't read the resulting .avi. I am trying both VLC and Amidemux, but neither seems to offer the option for uncompressed frames; they both require I pick a codec. Can you recommend any software that can do this?

At worst you can always use VirtualDub to produce an uncompressed AVI from an encoded one.

You might get MediaInfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en) and find out what the characteristics are of the .avi files that Poser can read - codec & settings - so you can try to duplicate them.

VirtualDub is probably a good bet. I recently found a plugin, "FLV Input Plugin"  that will allow it to read and convert .flv files. (http://moitah.net/) - you'll also need ffdshow installed (link on site). It worked fine for the couple of .flv files I've tried it on. Hopefully you can find a successful combination. Uncompressed is going to be quite large. I would think that there's a codec that Poser will work with - probably an older one I'm guessing. 

Note that the moitah.net site also has a FLV Extract utility that might help as well but you'll probably have to re-encode the extracted .avi anyway to get poser to read it, but it's an alternative if you can't get VirtualDub to read the .flv.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

Thanks for the advice. I actually just finished tearing apart my whole house looking for my copy of Movie Edit Pro which I just remembered I had bought about three years ago and never used. It should be able to convert the video. I don't know why they would make poser use such a limited type of video files. Did they even address that issue in Poser 8? Oh well, thanks again.

Attached Link: http://atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/get-video-software-windows-home/content/banco-datos-Welcome-Home-Pa

Try the link above - it's free.  Plus you can select which codecs to use if the default AVI one doesn't work with poser.

If that doesn't work, set the conversion codec in that app to WMV.

Bring the converted FLV into Windows Movie Maker, export it as a WMV  and then use this.... 
http://www.appfree.net/wmv-to-avi-mpeg/
....to convert from WMV to AVI.

You'll have to play around a bit to get the best quality but a mix of these and other stuff you have on your drive will do the trick.

I've just created a presentation where the video sources came from many diverse sources including youtube (with approval), animations from poser 4 and 8 and all put together using the bog standard Movie Maker and it looks OK  even on a  large 6ft electronic whiteboard.

Pinky - you left the lens cap of your mind on again.

 how do you check which codecs Poser 6 can use?

The mannual doesn't say how.

One trick I've used before when having problem importing into a video editor, is look at what it can export and then use the same codec/filetype when importing stuff. 

Not that scientific, but it usually works :)    

Pinky - you left the lens cap of your mind on again.