Converting .swf animations to .AVI, is Swish still the only option?

[Chainmax]

Or is a better method available nowadays?

[Chainmax]

It freezes upon loading a projector (.EXE) file, with CPU usage at 99% and 3/4 of ram usage :eek:.

[Nut]

i usually convert swf to avi and other video files using Flash to Video Encoder PRO, a worthwhile and convenient tool, and costs 99.95. but if you want just to try at first, there's a trial. look for it here (http://www.geovid.com/Flash_to_Video_Encoder_PRO/)

[Chainmax]

Sounds interesting, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion :).

[edit]It doesn't seem to support projector (.exe) files and doesn't seem to allow to configure the video code or leave the audio as-is. I need something that will allow me to do those two things.

[kumi]

I've used HugFlash before to create .AVI from .FLV files. It supports .SWF and .EXE too. Unfortunately the included manual is not in English, although you may get lucky with just the default settings. There's always babelfish.altavista.com too...

http://www.paw.hi-ho.ne.jp/milbesos/apldl.shtml

[Chainmax]

No luck, the default setting only convert to .exe to .swf and separates the sound into tons of MP3s.

[stegre]

You know, this issue has actually come to the forefront recently because of the popularity of really cute & fun little app called Line Rider (http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40255643/) (a student artist's upload to DeviantArt a couple of months ago and already has 10,000,000 "views"), and the 3,000+ people who have captured their Line Rider "creations" and uploaded them to YouTube (http://youtube.com/results?search_query=line+rider). Some of those uploads have half a million views themselves. Some people simply point a camera at their monitor, so there's one solution... ;)

More seriously, though, this is all described here (http://www.kottke.org/06/10/line-rider), along with six suggested apps for capturing generated SWF into AVI or something else uploadable. He mentions six apps, four of which are for Mac. Of the two Windows apps, one is commercial but the other is the open source CamStudio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/). This app does work and has a lot of potential; I've recently made a few very nice hi-res AVI's from SWF's (playing stand alone, in a browser, or as an .EXE "projector"; it doesn't care, as it's a "screen recorder" utility, not a format converter).

It has its limitations for sure - for one, unless you have a very fast CPU and/or are capturing a small area, you run into CPU issues. It seems to work only with VFW codecs, and only a subset of them at that. I can't go into the whole thing now (I'm at work) but by I got the good results by playing with it's priority and/or frame rate. With one setup the SWF animation ran very slowly (CamStudio was set very hi-pri) but it caught every frame and I later sped up the result to normal. Anyway, check it out..

[Chainmax]

I'll try CamStudio then, thanks for the tip :).

[Chainmax]

By the way, do flash animations have a framerate and resolution one can use as settings in CamStudio? If so, how can I find out which they are?

[Chainmax]

I tried it, it's ok but not really what I need: fullscreen captures look jagged and oversmoothed and there's no sound even though I manually coinfigured the speakers line. I need something more straightforward and faithful to the source, like FLVExtract+FVLSplitter+ffdshow+DirectShowSource for flash videos.

[JoeShrubbery]

Personally, I just play the flash in fullscreen and pipe my vid-card's TV-out straight into the capture card in my other computer. Long live the analog hole!

[AVIL]

@chainmax

AFAIK Camstudio also captures in windows mode. I suppose that jagging is produced by resizing. Open the flash video in the maximum size window with good looking and capture from it. After that do accurate Avisynth resizing (eedi2?).

I've captured powerpoint with audio and without any problem.

[kumi]

I just tried HugFlash on a couple of .SWFs. It will only convert video clips (H.263) embedded in the .SWF. If the "video" you want to extract is actually a Flash animation, it will not be converted.

I'm no expert, but I suspect there aren't many tools that will automatically convert animations to video, besides capture-type tools like Camstudio.

[Chainmax]

JoeShrubbery: that would of course be the best option, but I want to make a DVD I can see everywhere.

AVIL: I captured using a region and the full screen, with the flash animation at original size and fullscreen. In all four cases, the video looked oversmoothed and jagged wheter it was played in a window or fullscreen. And none of the cases had audio :(.

[AVIL]

Hi again,

Perhaps (rare but possible) you are playing with low quality option enabled.

Anyway they are two programs that could help:

SWFTOOLS at http://www.swftools.org/

and

SWF2AVI at http://www.pizzinini.net/projects/swf2avi/

I have not tested it but seems good software.

Good luck.

[Chainmax]

Nope, I set the projector file to high quality. How can I convert projector files (.EXE) to .SWF in order to be able to use SWF2AVI? Also, how can I record the sound?

[AVIL]

Hi,

SWFExtract from SWFTOOLS (first link of my last post) claims :

"Allows to extract Movieclips, Sounds, Images etc. from SWF files"

SWF2AVI suggest capture audio from windows mixer (i.e. with audacity).

They are a freeware that (perhaps, i havent tried) convert exe in swf:

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Misc__Utilities/EXE2SWF.html

but google reports more (and perhaps better) utilities than this.

Good luck