I have now wasted a full day on useless products claiming to produce SWF flash files from standard avi-files. I have seen the horror of shoddy amateur programming and moronic “buy this without knowing squat about it” tricks. I need help from someone…
Does anyone now a program that reliably creates quality SWF files from avi, and will allow at minimum one complete file to be made before buying?
Now I go and cry for a while…
Here you go…
http://www.swftools.org/
you can make them from PNG and jpeg too if you want 
Thanks, got it installed. But it just produces a 0kb swf that wont run… any ideas?
me too. been there. gave up. - “Veni, Vidi, Vaca”
Yeah, I just threw in the towel and got me a Quicktime Pro. QT .mov does progressive download just as well, I think… it’s all H263 anyway, AFAIK…
Just in case anyone was waiting for an answer, avi2swf will only create a SWF file from an already compliant AVI file. So, if your original AVI was h263 and MP3, it should have worked.
I cannot make it react to anything at all. I tried every codec with a “263” or “264” in it, and same result. If yours works (i.e. you have used it yourself, as opposed to simply knowing how it works), could you please tell me where I can get the pieces I seem to miss…?:eek:
I can get it to work, but the quality is pretty bad. Personally I’d use FFMPEG. Encode the video to FLV and the audio to MP3. I tested with an AVI file that is MJPEG as the video and WAV as the audio. The test run from inside the directory where ‘movie.avi’ is:
ffmpeg -i movie.avi -b 3000k -vcodec flv -ab 128k -ar 44100 -acodec libmp3lame output.swf
This works in Flash 9. If you want me to explain what’s happening here, I’ll be glad to. And by the way, this will work for anything FFMPEG can read, which is just about everything. This, of course, is if you have all of the correct libraries installed for FFMPEG.
I like a lot flix standard :
Converts to both swf and flv, several flavours. neat relation size/quality for flvs. the best in my tests.
But ffmpeg is very nice too.
Worked for me also, using sorenson codec and flv.Not using it though.(indeed, made some vids with fsv (flash screen video codec,lossless images) codec, though failed loosing frames in some videos…)
if you were after flv,(more stable and better way to display video in flash, imo,than swf) and play with it an swf player ( http://flowplayer.org/ open source, saved my neck, extremely good. ) , if you’re on windows, you could go very well also with Riva flv encoder (sort of easier than ffmpeg, tho I had no real troubles with ffmpeg with a user built win binary):
http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder
(I recommend as best combination, flowplayer, and on2 flix standard, but riva or ffmpeg worked ok too in my experiences )
Any of the ways have its tricks, as allways.
Use this and be happy.
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
Camstudio, http://www.camstudio.org/ , is an open-source screen recorder with an avi to swf converter(SWFProducer)
you can use Flash Video MX, I have used it for a long time.
I use This Converter… Have you ever tried it??? :eyebrowlift:
Use FFMPEG to convert it to flv and then use a freeware flv player.
I actually ended up, by accident, using CAM studio. Screen recording, AVI-to-SWF, and free. What more could a boy want?
I just found Jing! Works Great. see example: http://screencast.com/t/RprePssHh
creates embed tag for you too:
<object classid=“clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000” width=“569” height=“590”> <param name=“movie” value=“http://content.screencast.com/bootstrap.swf”></param> <param name=“quality” value=“high”></param> <param name=“bgcolor” value="#FFFFFF"></param> <param name=“flashVars” value=“thumb=http://content.screencast.com/media/028902c1-2ccb-4a4d-86c3-7980ba782eb3_2f50ac45-e61a-4095-9083-8401d982c42f_static_0_0_Thumbnail.gif&content=http://content.screencast.com/media/f6bc9107-45a9-45ec-b83a-a2128cac116c_2f50ac45-e61a-4095-9083-8401d982c42f_static_0_0_2008-02-06_0826.swf&width=569&height=590”></param> <param name=“allowFullScreen” value=“true”></param> <param name=“scale” value=“showall”></param> <param name=“allowScriptAccess” value=“always”></param> <embed src=“http://content.screencast.com/bootstrap.swf” quality=“high” bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width=“569” height=“590” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” allowScriptAccess=“always” flashVars=“thumb=http://content.screencast.com/media/028902c1-2ccb-4a4d-86c3-7980ba782eb3_2f50ac45-e61a-4095-9083-8401d982c42f_static_0_0_Thumbnail.gif&content=http://content.screencast.com/media/f6bc9107-45a9-45ec-b83a-a2128cac116c_2f50ac45-e61a-4095-9083-8401d982c42f_static_0_0_2008-02-06_0826.swf&width=569&height=590” allowFullScreen=“true” scale=“showall”></embed> </object>
… yeah it sux that we can’t embed an object here. Ya got any pull with blenderartists admins?
Edit, seriously, wouldn’t this Jing thing work great in our support forums? Guy’s got a question, you fire up a quick vid of the solution and post it right in the tread. No having to take 30mins to type out a long boring, often undeciferable, description of the solution. It’d be sweet, and could turn into a really powerful resource for users. Think about this on the WIKI, too!
I actually ended up, by accident, using CAM studio. Screen recording, AVI-to-SWF, and free. What more could a boy want?
problem is stability in fps, and sometimes a “red-out” problem, probably for similar issue…specially with just a bit long videos…
For that reason I recommended, riva encoder or , better, the comercial on2, if to total quality/size ratio…riva is good to go anyway. Ffmpeg worked for me as well. You only gotta use any of the available free and/or open source flv players and set it in your server…is pretty easy, some settings and you’re done.
BTW, didnt know about that jing…downloading…
(the things is flv, imho is quite better format for video that raw swf, for a reason youtube and many other video streaming sites use that: a swf which plays a flv…)
umm… flash?
wow! this is my old post… how much people use Flash to Video Encoder Pro!!! That’s really good! :))