Convert Flash 6, 7 to version 5 (for palm devices)

[drbuzz0]

Hello. I'm interested in extending the flash support on Palm devices, which currently only support flash versions 5 and under, through the MMflash player, which comes with Clie handhelds.

The program cannot open flash 6(MX) or 7 files, but I have managed to decompile and rebuild flash 6 and 7 files to flash 5 format and play them without any loss of major features.

My question is what makes version 6 and 7 different than 5?

according to wikipedia

Released with Flash Player 6, new features included: a video codec (Sorenson Spark), Unicode, v1 UI Components, compression, ActionScript vector drawing API

Flash 7 introduces Actionscript 2.0


Well... Flash Video *IS* supported by palm devices, though kinoma player, although not when it is integrated into a larger flash project.

However, even non-video files do not play> Therefore, I have to think it must be the Actionscript Vector drawing, compression and Unicode. Also, Actionscript 2.0 would be a problem.

Does anyone know how these might be converted to something flash could be converted to something flash-5 would understand?

Even if it means that some functions would be lost, such as in flash files which impliment heavy use of actionscript based vectoring, it would still be great if there were an easy way to extend the functionality, by building on the existing flash-5 support.


Many thanks
Steve

[hp3]

-----
I have managed to decompile and rebuild flash 6 and 7 files to flash 5 format and play them without any loss of major features.
-----
first, I hope that you are not decompiling and altering content for which you do not own the copyright. We do not condone this sort of behavior, here at FlashKit.

-----
Well... Flash Video *IS* supported by palm devices, though kinoma player, although not when it is integrated into a larger flash project.
-----
3rd parties sometimes use the term "Flash video" or "Flash movies" in an ambiguous way. Flash movies in the context of Kinoma are just vector animation with no actionscript. They are not true motion graphic video like AVI format.

Flash Video FLV format, ie true motion video, is not part of the Flash 5 player capability. So, FLV content is not available for this player.

The only way to get content working on an older version of Flash is to redo the ActionScript and other features so that the content is backward compatible, and in the case of CLIE, optimized for playback on the device.

[drbuzz0]

1. No I have not tried to alter the content or in any other way hack the files. I have only used some software tools which are designed for repackaging/compressing/optomizing flash content. I see this as no different than transcoding a video, which is available to the public but is not in a format your device likes.

2. Kinoma will play FLV files, as those in Youtube. If you give it a URL, it will play the video, but it will not be able to render the player controls, only the FLV which the SWF file refers to.


I suppose you are saying that there's no simple way of converting a flash 6 or 7 file to flash 5 format, even if the file does not make use of full motion video?

[hp3]

I hadnt looked at Kinoma in awhile. In previous versions, I believe it only supported simple SWF, no actionscript. Good to see that it is now supporting FLV. Thanks for pointing that out.

If you have the FLA for a given project, then, using the Flash Authoring software, you can try to export to Flash 5. The Authoring software will alert any incompatibilities, which you would need to change manually before reattempting an export.

Perhaps there are commercial software that attempt to automatically work around incompatible feature sets, but I am not familiar with these.

Unsupported ActionScript functions would be a common issue. For example a common ActionScript usage in Flash 6+ is to use the movie clip event model or createEmptyMovieClip(). Neither of these will work with Flash 5 and there is no convenient way to automate a workaround, that I can think of.