Projector file

[Bob Hartzell]

I had a link to a freeware product for doing this but now it points to a $279 product. Is there any freeware software for doing this aside from the free Flash trial version or are there are any inexpensive products?

[necromanthus]

Originally posted by Bob Hartzell
I had a link to a freeware product for doing this but now it points to a $279 product. Is there any freeware software for doing this aside from the free Flash trial version or are there are any inexpensive products?

Burak K has what you're looking for (and many other goodies):
http://buraks.com/swifty/

you may count on this guy
;)

[johnie]

You can also just drag any SWF into a premade projector file and it unlocks the menu to create a new projector file with the SWF.

This is usefull if you are comparing Flash 4, 5, 6... behaviors and what users of older projectors will see. I wrote a tutorial on this.

[Fingermonkey]

Macromedia's Stand-alone Flash Player (Free) can do it. Just open any .swf with it then click File > Create Projector.

[johnie]

The standalone player is typically distributed with Flash. At one time that was the only way to get it, by downloading Flash itself. I am not sure if they altered that policy, although at one time they did offer a Linux version of the standalone player which obviously was not distributed with Flash itself.

All projector files have the standalone player built in and most if not all of them supported drag and drop. When you drag a SWF into another projector file it unlocks the standalone player menu and replaces the projectors SWF with the one you have. This is very usefull to know especially since most versions of MS Office XP use Flash Projector files as the tour.

So basically if you have Windows XP there is a good chance, you have the standalone player already in the form of the tour projector file.

[Bob Hartzell]

Are you saying that if I include a projector file with the koolmoves distribution which plays a movie which says "drag your swf here to create a projector", it will work and does not have any distribution right problems?

[johnie]

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/dist_sap.htm


Stand-alone Flash projectors can be distributed freely without entering into a license agreement.


There are more technotes and pages at Macromedia that also go into this.

SWF Browser, and several other SWF enhancing tools, actually included a projector file to make the projectors. When you made a projector file it simply passed it on to the included projector file. It is really kind of sloppy to do so in my opinion. A more sophisticated aproach is one taken by the latter tools where it used an embeded version of the regular flash player and could advance what you wanted to do. MediaChance MMB http://www.mediachance.com/oldindex.html is an example of a program that does this and Runtime Revolution (Cross Platform includes MAC, Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris, and about 15 other platforms) is another.

It elludes me however how you could distribute a copyrighted work (The standalone player) without a license, not a contract such as a EULA, to do so. Macromedia claims it is thus though.

http://www.flashkeeper.com/ is a piece of shareware that costs 29.99 and it can go either from EXE to SWF or the other way.

Another one that makes projectors is this one here http://www.flash-player.us/ It is 19.99 for the full version 2.0 and has a free version and a trial version.

A whole list of them are here http://www.soft411.com/software/swf-to-exe.html

[necromanthus]

Johnie is right.
But BOB ... feel free to include the SA FlashPlayer in any project.
But what about Burak's SWF tools ?