
Have a Flash SWF File? convert it to HTML5 with Google Swiffy - Concours
http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/
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robterrell
If you're thinking about using this, you might also consider Gordon
(<https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon>) or Smokescreen
(<https://github.com/cesmoak/smokescreen>). Gordon's simpler -- very easy to
follow code. Whereas Smokescreen, like Swiffy, offers support for audio and
AS2. I integrated Gordon into my HTML5 game yesterday to render a walk cycle
SWF and the framerate didn't drop. I'm going to do the same thing with
Smokescreen next.

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stewars
Swiffy saved the day for us recently on a project where we needed an animation
to support IE7+ as well as iPad. We were able to have our designer create a
flash animation and upload to swiffy to test that the conversion worked. We
then used the swf as a fallback for when canvas was not available.

The one HUGE drawback for me with swiffy is there was no standalone compiler
that we could use and integrate into the site build. So we now have this
manual step of converting the files on the (hopefully still functioning)
swiffy website every time a change is required to the animation.

~~~
ma2rten
I guess it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool which automates that. You
could probably even just use curl. I also trust that Google has enough
interest in HTML5 adoption that they will make sure that this tool will
continue to function.

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andybak
Moderately complex intro animation from an old e-learning course I did
converted successfully (failed on earlier versions of this tool so obviously
they've been improving things).

No sound, not much scripting but lots of timeline animation with masked
images.

swf: 205kb html: 352kb

(not including the swiffy runtime.js)

Not bad considering all the images have to be base64 encoded.

Generated code looked... generated... But not too awful. You could probably do
something with it if you needed to.

However - it's no worse than trying to modify a swf file. You just wouldn't
unless you ran it through a decompiler first and I don't see why that wouldn't
be possible here also.

In most cases you'd go back to the FLA file or the XML equivalent and modify
that instead.

~~~
ma2rten
Are those sizes before or after gzip compression ?

~~~
andybak
Before. A quick test by just zipping them up gave:

html: 209kb swf: 205kb

Does anyone know whether 'on the wire' gzip would give similar benefits?

~~~
icebraining
Two notes:

1\. Zip uses a different algorithm than gzip - the results are not necessarily
equivalent.

2\. If the HTML is static, which seems to be the case (since it's generated
manually from the SWF), you can pre-gzip them instead of forcing the server to
do it on demand - that'll reduce latency and CPU usage. Therefore "on the
wire" is not really relevant.

~~~
jevinskie
Zip and gzip both use DEFLATE.

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guard-of-terra
Tried to recode random Масяня cartoon, it wouldn't play and would not support
audio even if it would.

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rickdangerous1
Literally yesterday I had conversation about the coming wave of flash to HTML5
conversion tools and services. Expect to see alot of effort going into
conversion automation. Yes there will always be a need for hand crafted
conversion but a lot can and will be automated.

~~~
est
> flash to HTML5 conversion tools and services

Which is a horrible thing. Images there are like 20 canvas elements on a page
drawing animated ads. I am sure Macbook fans would roar higher than Flash

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Achshar
Machine generated HTML5.. hmm something in the back of my head tells me if you
file isn't massive, its worth doing it yourself because it might produce
bloated code. i.e it will be kind of difficult to work on that code later
yourself.

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SnowLprd
Swiffy can't handle files input SWF files larger than 1024 MB and will display
an error to that effect if you try. It might be more user-friendly if that
fact were displayed on the file upload page. Just a suggestion!

~~~
duskwuff
Larger than a gigabyte? I should hope that you don't have too many Flash files
that big...

~~~
SnowLprd
Hehe... Thanks for catching my error. That should have read: "1 MB" or "1024
KB".

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j45
Too bad this doesn't work in all browsers yet.

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noduerme
Now if they could just port playerglobal 11 to Javascript, we can run Molehill
games in Canvas. Think how happy everyone will be to get that CPU-intensive
Flash plugin out of their browser, when they find that now every website chews
up 400% more processing power. A cynic might think they were promoting
Javascript over AS3 so everyone would have to buy a round of newer, faster
phones once these SVG animations start hitting the web.

~~~
zabar
You already have tools that do that, like <http://jangaroo.net>

Just for large project switching to an interpreted language like javascript
with another layer of abstraction to emulate the flash API is too much of a
performance hit.

