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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner

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Thanks I totally missed that, when did that get posted? Flash has a very important place still, and that is a great illustration of it. There was a lot of content being created in Flash that was beautiful. The video renderings just aren't the same. Old Metallicops was great, the Star Wars rap, good times..

Here is an example I can think of off the top of my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA http://uploads.ungrounded.net/558000/558516_dotdotdot.swf?12...

I remember learning a lot of Flash and ActionScript using decompliers; you could see the code, assets, all sorts of fun stuff almost like view source in the web browser. Can't do that in video, thankfully we can in HTML5 but inspection of code isn't straight forward for more intense games yet.

It was posted a few weeks ago. http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Flash_is_Dead

How hard would it be to convert those Flash videos into mp4s for archival in the IA?

EDIT: Looks like they've been uploaded to Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom

Not quite so straight forward, a lot of their videos were interactive for hidden gems. They will be lost when moving to a linear file format.

With access to the source, it should be possible to export them to HTML5 using Adobe's flash authoring tools. I've never tried it though, and I don't know how good the HTML5 versions would be.

Edit: huh, it kinda runs with Mozilla's Flash-runtime replacement, Shumway. Another few rounds of bugfixes and we might not need any Adobe code to play these files just as they are.

The problem with most current Flash-to-HTML5 conversions is that they only barely support ActionScript, if at all. So anything meaningfully interactive (like minigames) is pretty much out.

Shumway makes it sound like "we got this" (which then discourages someone like me--someone who has a ton of knowledge of compiler design and a lot of background specifically with JavaScript-based language but almost no interest in duplicating effort, someone who would normally see this call to action and go "oh, I'll add this to my todo list"--from even spending much time researching the current space). Are you saying Shumway only "barely" supports ActionScript?

There are several such projects - swfdec, lightspark, gnash, etc. From what I've seen of them, they all underestimated the amount of effort. Most of them just petered out. So if you're going for it, I would worry less about duplicating effort and more about setting realistic goals for the project.

The big problem is that AS2 and AS3 are drastically different from each other and neither of them can safely be ignored.

Supporting even one of them in its entirety is a Herculean effort. Supporting both is insane.

I wonder if we could wrap them in an OpenFL app exported to HTML5. OpenFL can render SWF content; as for the triggers for the interactive bits that might require access to the original source, alternatively it could be reproduced, it's usually just a matter of "click here to go to scene X" and the hidden scenes themselves would be extant already.

Excellent point.

I did this for Strongbad emails years ago using some off-the-shelf flash to mp4 converter but a number of the videos had issues because they were interactive (and not just at the end but sometimes in the middle). I got the majority of them (at the time) converted so I could watch them on my iPod video. This was before I went full-on-data-hoarder and so I deleted them forever ago. Recently I tried to do it again and have all the swfs downloaded but haven't found a great way to mass convert them so I can put them in Plex (media server). If anyone has a good way to do it on linux via the command line I'd be very interested.

is it necessary? having html5-based flash players seems a better solution.

I was a huge Homestar Runner fan, even got the figurines which my daughter now plays with.

All their content was produced in Flash as at the time, it really was the only suitable delivery mechanism.

Shumway can be used as a runtime for those movies - the site owner just to need fallback to its HTML player. It plays common ActionScript 1/2/3 usages well.

The "flashisdead" page requires Flash, but I guess that's the joke?

Definitely. Nothing on the site has been updated to non-flash (yet?).

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