As we all know, the cancer that was flash has been dead for a while.
However, there's still a bunch of short clips/animations written in it. I intend to archive a bunch before all the tech/websites disappear.
How the fuck do you convert it to a more modern format?
ffmpeg only converts the sound in the examples I've tried.
They're almost completely non-interactive, so it should eventually be simple.
I feel like I'm missing something really fucking obvious.
Use a screen recording software.
If the SWF contains the animation as a video or raw frames you can extract them with JPEXS FFDec as long as you're willing to deal with Java.
flash was single-handedly the best media format ever created.
nothing will ever replace it
nothing will ever come close to it
i can't even upload a .swf in Holla Forums, the dark times are here...
I don't really think there's anything else that does what .swf does. I mean you could treat them like video files but not all of them are videos, and of course you lose some information because they're no longer vectored. Best thing for archival is to grab the files as is and hope one day you'll be able to play them on libre software. (God knows how shitty the existing alternatives to Flash are.)
I was never quite clear on why Flash was considered a cancer, beyond these three points:
Considering that 1 is already fixed, it seems like 2 & 3 could be rectified if Adobe liberated Flash. But is there any other reason people didn't like it?
Go back to halfreddit
Is there any other reason to hate something other than those three?
ffmpeg -i cancervideo.swf -codec copy slightlylesscancer.mp4
Or just play them directly, all non-shit video players use ffmpeg.
Well, yes, for example if the swf format was technically unworkable or something.
Everyone talks about hating Flash as though it were some property of Flash itself, not a contingent fact that Adobe could fix on a whim. I was wondering if that was in fact a correct way of thinking.
Flash is very cpu intensive and not at all portable. Unlike video and music which have hardware decoding.
There's a sfw to video converter made by Newgrounds. It only works on Windows and OSX though, and it's not open source.
newgrounds.com
Absolutely botnet. Downvoted.
This
Simple screen Recorder is pretty good
I know this is bait but:
Flash was shit from the start it's scripting language is a derivative from JS called ActionScript.
It was heavier and more insecure than javascript in everyway.
Every flash video or animation asked for an enormous amount of resources.
The only reason for it to be adopted on the web in general is because Adobe was the first to propose this.
And people took the bait.
And still nowadays there are people and companies who still use that piece of shit.
Ankama for example who still uses it for it's MMO or it's cartoon.
And this is a plague because free software solutions for this exist
"Synfig Studio"
It doesn't read/edit swf format but it's a good tool imo.
There's also "pencil" for frame to frame animation.
The swf format was opened by adobe.
But a Gnash developer explained that what adobe released was about only 10% of what was needed to make everything work.
Worst of all what was releases was already know by the gnash team via reverse engineering.
That's the whole problem of closed formats.
It never felt natural as a part of web design. Flash elements were always big, white boxes that stole input focus once you clicked on them. Despite being a keyframe animation system flash never allowed for variable frame rates, which meant you had to pick a fixed frame rate that was either too slow, or too fast and thus choppy on low end machines.
Once they realized CSS transforms, Canvas, WebGL, , , and Javascript performance were catching up, they implemented Stage3D. Not only was it a shitty API, but they failed to provide artist-friendly 3D authoring tools which was really the only reason anyone would use flash in the first place.
It's an inscrutable black box in which standard UI controls are reimplemented, generally very poorly. Examples: Flash-based menus that take 3 seconds to open up and have size 5 font, Flash-based text input you can't copy, Flash-based scrollbars that accelerate and decelerate because it looks "cool", etc.
Ok, I'll try screen recording again.
I tried vokoscreen, but it was doing a shit job, so I'll find something else
That was the command I tried out earlier, but it just piped out the audio.
Yeah, since it's vectored there a noticeable loss in quality if you screen record.
Everything in a flash animation is contained within the .swf file, correct? It doesn't make external requests, or load shit from somewhere else?
Thanks! I'll give that a run.
Appreciate the help! I was struggling searching for this for hours.
There's also this: github.com
Not sure if it's any good.
Yes, by default flash files are self-contained, but accessing external resources is possible and might be used in some more complex swfs like some games.
Forgot the link
maartenbaert.be
if they are in vector, then there's no good&popular replacement yet.
(hmm… actually I've heard that SVG may be animated, so maybe translating vector data to animated SVG is the final solution)
converting vector to raster is a dumb idea because it'll take more space and have worse quality.
shit quality
Flash on every level, including physical, is AIDS. It only became "popular" back then because autists could make fun games and animation shorts with it and there was nothing else even remotely similiar. The ActionScript was somehow even shittier than JavaScript, they were all enormous resource hogs and when flash-based ads started to appear everywhere Flash slowly became a huge unwanted and unnecessary "feature".
Youtube switched to HTML5; Flash games were killed off by apps and smartphones; Flash animations, which required actual drawing skills, were replaced by e-celeb bullshit, let's plays and other low-effort trash on Youtube. All of these slowly made Flash a kind of a relic. I think nowadays Flash is not even enabled by default in Firefox, the Flash scene is more or less dead. Newgrounds nowadays is nothing but begging for donations. What a shame, some of the games were actually fun and had a lot of work put into them. Still waiting for a decent libre Flash player, I have lots of old .swf games saved.
I don't get this "Flash is a resource hog".
Yes, it is and has always been CPU intensive, but it uses less resources than HTML5 video decoding.
Flash in GNU doesn't have hardware acceleration thanks to driver and X11 shenanigans, yet it was possible to play 1080p YouTube videos in my old Pentium P6200 laptop with no problems; but HTML5 makes it crawl and shoots CPU usage to 90 %.
Flash videos are lighter than decoding webms.
People on Newgrounds use a program called Swivel which converts a flash movie to actual video. I don't know what happens if you give it something interactive though. Also it's Windows and Mac only.
newgrounds.com