swf-to-vid in linux?

[evolbeagle]

Hi,

There are tons of utilities for converting swf files to video formats for Windows, but so far I can't find anything similar in linux. I've tried most of the main Windows candidates in my CrossOver set-up, but none work. I've also tried mencoder and ffmpeg natively in linux, but neither can read swf files as far as I can tell. I know this may be a longshot asking here, but I figured what the heck...

I don't even need super high quality. I'd just like the option of putting my finished KM animations up on something like YouTube.

Thanks,

Matt

[blanius]

?? I assume your running Windows as well, seeing that you are using KM. Why not convert it while still under Windows. Also I thought Utube did the FLV conversions themselves and that you submit in WMV,MOV,AVI ect.

[evolbeagle]

Nope, no Windows, just CrossOver . (What's that old saw about assuming... ? ) And, yes, YouTube will do the flv step, but I need the avi (or whatever) to submit; I have swf files and they don't take swfs as far as I know.

And, again, I have tried most of the Windows based swf-to-video converters, but none of them run under CrossOver.

Thanks for the reply.

Matt

[John U.]

Hypothetically , maybe you could export the movie as bmp images in koolmoves and then import those into the GIMP to save as an AVI?

[tmoore935]

I can convert swfs for you if you like with flash 8 and I have some other stuff. You may not like this idea and i understand. Either way I would not mind seeing the finished videos on youtube when your finished.

[evolbeagle]

Hypothetically , maybe you could export the movie as bmp images in koolmoves and then import those into the GIMP to save as an AVI?

John U.,

Yes, if I could get a good bitmap sequence I'd be in business. There are two ways to export those in KM, of course. One doesn't catch the actionscript stuff, so it's out. (Now that I've learned a bit of actionscript, I'm using it in my animations and would hate to do without it.) The second way, where you get a sequence of screen captures while it plays slowly in your browser, is one of the small handful of items that doesn't work correctly for me under CrossOver. (KM performs about 98% perfectly under CrossOver; this falls in that 2%.) I've got some emails out to some open source developers asking about some external swf-player-screen-capture possibilities, though, so maybe that avenue will turn up something.

I can convert swfs for you if you like with flash 8 and I have some other stuff. You may not like this idea and i understand. Either way I would not mind seeing the finished videos on youtube when your finished.

tmoore935,

Thanks for the offer. As a last resort, I may take you up on it for one short movie just to have the chance to put something up on YouTube. I've also got a friend nearby who's on Windows and I may grab one of the Windows converters and put it on her machine to use. She's doing some of the voice work in one of the projects, so that arrangement might work, at least for a while. At any rate, I appreciate the offer and all of the suggestions from everybody. I'm sure there'll be some way to get a swf converted to video before it's all said and done.

Thanks,

Matt

[John U.]

>One doesn't catch the actionscript stuff, so it's out

yea, I wonder how hard it would be to add a switch that would catch it?

This guy claims you can use a program called mencoder for swf to avi conversion. I know next to nothing about linux so can't verify

http://www.thisishull.net/showthread.php?t=245210

[evolbeagle]

John U.,

I actually stumbled across that page and tried that approach to no avail. Mencoder complains that it can't read the swf. I've looked high and low for whatever codec it may need, but came up empty. I'm no mencoder expert, but I can use it from the command line to knit together an image sequence. That page also mentions using ffmpeg to convert swf to avi but I couldn't get that to work either.

I'm also not sure if the example given at that link has been verified to work even by the person who offered the code. I note that it says "this is an example of how I would do it..." At any rate, I haven't been able to get either mencoder or ffmpeg to do the trick. I even tried outputting an uncompressed swf from KM in case that was what prevented things from working, but still no luck.

Matt

[tmoore935]

I remember some time ago that an arguement occured in another forum in flashkit on this subject. The actionScript didn't work because the player needs to have a flash player. Making a DVD from a swf will work if there is no actionScript since the DVD player cannot have a flashplayer. I did make a avi once from the koolmoves Lava lamp in the clip art folder. When I was done I had a 30 sec file which took up a large part of the disk. And i think a FLV would be like a DVD.

So I would be curious to your findings as I gave up on it in the past.

[evolbeagle]

If I can get something working I'll definitely make a report. I came sort of close using a desktop capture program yesterday, which didn't produce high quality video but it was good enough for my purposes. The deal breaker was that the resulting video displayed - in a really annoying and flickering fashion - the bounding boxes of the various movieclips that made up the animation. So the result wasn't very watchable.

It seems in principle that you ought to be able to retool a swf player to render, say, a png sequence instead of just playing the swf in real time. While such an approach may not work for everyone, it would work for me since I'm already fairly adept at knitting together image sequences and combining them with sound (thanks to programs like MEncoder and Cinelerra). (And you could even have the player go ahead and knit the sequence together I suppose. Heck, you could probably even have it re-attach the sound track. But I'd be happy to get the image sequence.)

I'm going to take a gander at the linux player, Gnash, and see if there's any chance of me modifying it to do what I need. It's probably all over my head code-wise, but I'll give it a look. There are also a few OS utilities written in Ruby that I'm going to look at to see if I can learn anything there.

My thinking is that, given a frame rate and overall length for a certain swf, that means that there are X number of frames in the movie (assuming frames in flash are real and not just a construct to make swf creation easier for humans). If you could get a player to render all X frames as a png sequence - letting it take however long that process takes, regardless of how long the movie is supposed to last - you'd be in business. This would essentially be a hybrid of the two approaches for frame capture in KM. Approach 1 captures every frame but doesn't apply scripting, presumably because the captures are being handled internally and aren't running through an actual swf player so there's nothing that knows how to apply any scripts. KM's second approach feeds the movie out to the flash player which does know how to handle the scripts, but the flash player isn't designed to slow down and capture each frame as a png or whatever. But if you could tweak a player to render a frame, output it to png, then render the next frame, output it to png, and so on for all X frames in the swf, you'd essentially have the beginnings of a movie rendering process not unlike what I see when I work with an NLE.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about as I drifted off to sleep last night.

Matt