things you discover at work

[egypturnash]

Huh, the 'fullscreen' thing that Youtube and all the other Flash video sites is a feature of Flash, not of the FLV decoder. I'm surprised every damn little Flash game isn't offering this.

Comments

[cryptodragon.livejournal.com]

Probably because flash is horrible at scaling up some times and will start to eat CPU. Also I would bet that most flash games aren't as vector as they could be.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's something I've bitched about in the past. This is why you see a lot of people doing pixel-arty Flash games - Flash's bitmap bitblt(+scale/rot) routines are a lot faster than the vector-drawing ones.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

So here's a flash question for you. Is it possible to render vector based flash anims to FLV for nicer playback?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Should be.

I dunno about doing them if you just have the SWF, but if you have the source FLA and the Flash editor you can do file->export->export movie, then run whatever that generates through the FLV compressor. No, you can't do it in one step from the editor; that would be easy and Flash doesn't believe in easy.

You might also be able to import the SWF to the editor and export it. You may lose a lot.

[inaki.livejournal.com]

*nod* the reason I as is I'm looking into building a furry youtube-style media site, but want to include support for things like flash animation, as well as FLV movies and music.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

I figure the workflow you want is embodied in two command-line programs: one to convert from swf to mov*, one to convert from mov to flv. The latter obviously exists, or YouTube wouldn't exist; the former, I'm not so sure about. Look on places like osflash.org.

Alternatively you could just, well, put the swf in the page. You'd be stuck with whatever loader and progress bar the animation's creator added (in other words, probably none). This is probably better for bandwidth purposes. (You could also have a little shell swf that loads in the actual animation, provides a standard preloader, and a scrubbable progress bar - but implementing a generalized scrubbable progress bar is a royal bitch.)

*where 'mov' is a stand-in for any video format - mpeg, avi, quicktime, etc.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Is it suppose to display a blank screen?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nope. The blinking-face animation is supposed to fill up the whole screen. If you can't fullscreen stuff on Youtube either then maybe you need to update your Flash plugin.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

*checks*
*Confirms*
*installs drivers*
*No Effect*

Hmmm. I bet it's a conflict between my GC and the Flash Drivers. Or maybe it's a conflict with my widescreen and Flash. I don't know.

No worries.