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Comment by ivansavz | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js?

I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do math. There is some great content, but would have to be abandoned since Flash is no longer supported.)

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You might be able to do this with the official Flash editor. Hold on, lemme check.

1. Acquire Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash)

2. Make a new HTML5 project

3. file>import>import to stage

4. file>publish, this sure can take a while, it’s been stuck at 80% on the file I pulled out to test this on for some time.

Caveats:

* Some SWFs are "protected" and won’t be loaded by the editor, you can find tools online to crack that protection pretty easily IIRC. Or at least you could back in the day.

* This won’t get the sound.

Installing Animate also gets you the Flash Player, which will play any .swf; you could conceivably record the screen as a .mov or whatever. Though a cursory google search reveals multiple websites that claim to be able to spew out a video file from your uploaded .swf.

You could also acquire a swf decompiler and use that: decompile .swf, load the resulting .fla into Animate, export as canvas. I don’t know which decompilers are currently the best, it’s been years since I last did Flash.

Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere, I'm game.

> I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX.

Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done. No need to reinvent the wheel.

If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency, there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a container and you're set. The only niggle is that gnash is... kinda bad. It's slow and a bunch of swf files I have don't work (some don't work at all, others have weird graphical problems).

If you want to contribute, gnash would be a good candidate, I guess:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html

My experience with gnash is that it even partially works on maybe 10% of the swf files I've tried. It's basically unusable.

The problem with “contributing” to a project that belongs to someone else, is that your contributions might be handily ignored, no matter how incredible and wonderful they may be.

And so, often, the only recourse to such an outcome is to roll your own from scratch.

Why from scratch? You can take advantage of existing projects and make your own fork.

True. However, depending on the manner of licensing applicable to a given project, one might be forced comply with aspects of the protection a given license affords.

So then the choice leaves one working with intellectual property controlled by people who might ignore offers to improve their project, but in the same breath, demand attribution for the burden they inflict.

Why bother playing the sycophant to an emperor with no clothes?

Lightspark

https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark

I have done a few flash to HTML5 conversions without source code, and the method I've gone with is just to use the flash as a guide and write the HTML5 app from scratch. You end up with cleaner, more maintainable code that way than if you were to throw it into a converter and try to sort out what comes out, and it can end up taking the same amount of time as trying to fix whatever the converter came up with in the end. Do you have any links to the flash products? Might be worth putting what you have in a GitHub repo and see who can contribute. Maybe try https://www.codetriage.com/ as well. If you end up doing either, let me know and I'll try to help :)

Are you sure that Shumway wont work? I can run some of my old swfs on it, it was a little cumbersome setting it up (primarily because I didnt have all dependencies installed but it was only a few) then run grunt

If you have the original source file (FLA), Adobe Animate (formerly Flash Pro) can export to Canvas. It uses the Create JS library for export / runtime:

https://createjs.com/

You can try Jeff - https://www.npmjs.com/package/jeff

It should be able to do it.

"Discontinued" does not mean "they don't work". Have you tried them?

Swiffy was offered as an API and is no longer available, so can't try.

I tried reading the Shumway docs + follow the build instructions but got nowhere. I think it was meant to be used as a plugin for firefox (to emulate Flash runtime). I have it a whole day and got nowhere, so I'll count that in the tried-but-failed category.

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