Flip Video Ultra on Linux

My Flip video camera arrived yesterday, and I'm quite happy with it. It does everything it's supposed to: starts up fast, records and plays back through an astoundingly simple interface, and mounts as a USB mass storage device. The videos play back perfectly on my Ubuntu 7.10 system, and Kino can import and edit them if ffmpeg is installed.

I did have some problems using the camera with a Windows XP laptop. The Windows program stored on the camera failed to start up, saying that "E:\SYSTEM\VIEWER\PD\settings\pathsInfo.txt does not contain a valid list." The firmware updater from the Flip web site failed with a similar error. Finally I found the Flip Video Program installer, which fixed both of those problems. (It took me a while to figure this out, so I'm documenting it here in case other Flip owners have the same problem.)