A client of ours, Marina Protection Systems, is going to be at a boat show in the coming week. They have a Flash animation on their website that they’d like to have displaying in a continuous loop on a TV screen in their booth at the show.

I set about decoding the SWF file and in the end managed to convince Quicktime Pro to handle it for me. The trick was allowing Flash components to always be accessed via Quicktime. I was experiencing a black image when I attempted to export from SWF and figured out that I had to allow Flash access all the time from within Quicktime.

I tried a bunch of online conversion sites and trawled heaps of forums looking for SWF convertors but the best I could find would only take FLV (Flash Video) and not SWF. ffmpeg (and it’s Mac OSX cousin ffmpegX), which normally chews this kind of thing up for breakfast, wouldn’t touch it either - apparently it’ll handle the audio stream only, which is no use when I only care about the video.

I exported it as a high-quality DivX file and then using Visual Hub converted the DivX directly into a DVD ISO. I then used Disco to burn the ISO file and I tested it in my Panasonic DVD player. It worked a treat and the resolution was quite high, considering the source was a web animation.