Corrupted Flash movie question

General Questions
#1

A friend sent me a link featuring some Flash movies (which were to free to download). He wanted to know if I could transfer them to a DVD so he could watch them on TV. I said, no problem.

However, the videos appear to be faulty. They will get to about the halfway point and the video will freeze, but the audio will continue.

Also, it looks like someone took a Quicktime movie and captured it into a Flash movie. The video plays within what appears to be a Quicktime display.

Screen capture

Is there anyway to fix this without having to buy a Flash editor?

#2

bump

#3

My, the contents of that screenshot are icky. Can you send me the link? I’d like to see this for myself.

The bad news is, even if you have the flash editor, you probably won’t be able to edit the flash movie. Flash movies (animations, actually), when first created, are saved in the .fla format. They can then be loaded and re-edited. When you want to ‘publish’ them in a format that browsers can use, you export them as .swf files and upload that to the website. AFAIK, even the creator can’t edit the .swf file. You have to make changes in the source .fla file and re-export to .swf.

I am not an expert in Macromedia Flash; there may be some kind of ‘decompiler’ for .swf files; I don’t know what it is. If you find one, I’d like to know about it. :slight_smile:

There seem to be different settings for viewing the flash movie as well. Some flash files I’ve been able to save to disk and I get a file that plays properly in the flash player; others just yield a blank screen in the flash player. I suspect that at least some flash files have a variable online component and will not work properly unless they are being streamed from a web server.

As for saving a flash animation to a DVD, wht we need is a flash-to-MPEG-2 or AVI converter with the proper codecs. Ironically, the original Quicktime file you mention would do just as well. Most DVD authoring programs can import MPEG-2, AVI, or Quicktime.

I need to find out more about this.

#4

I’m not an expert either, but I have occasionally wanted to pull stuff out of SWF files too. I’ve found a couple of tools to do this. Try swfdump and swfextract (source code apparently available now from SWFTools; I haven’t tried building from that distribution though). I suspect that the movie clips are embedded in the SWF essentially unchanged, so you can probably also use a hex editor to just pull the relevant part out.

#5

I talked to my friend about this. He believes he can locate the original source material (some old VHS tapes).

I am still curious as to why the tapes were processed they way they were (VHS->Quicktime->Flash).

Thanks for the interest, though. I was hoping for a simple solution.

#6

If your friend has the source tapes, it would be better to encode a DVD straight from them and ignore the flash altogether. You’ll need, at the minimum, a VCR with as high-quality playback as you can get, a video digitiser, and some simple DVD authoring software.

#7

That’s no problem. I’m all eat up with DVD recording stuff. :smiley:

#8

Omphaloskeptic, those SWF tools look very interesting. They appear to fill a hole in my toolkit, and maybe I’ll be able to figure out how Chocolate Niblet Beans actially works… :smiley: