QuickTime SWFs

PascalTheRascal - 09:29am Apr 26, 2008 PST

this sounds complicated but it isn’t too bad.

Since the upgrade to QuickTime 7.3, mac users can no longer use it to view Flash SWF files. Furthermore, viewing SWFs within a GraphicConverter <http://www.lemkesoft.com/> slide show has been crippled. This problem seems to be general across many applications, including Keynote. This is a nuisance affecting many people as a quick Google with “MAC OS X” SWF QUICKTIME will reveal.

Last June I premiered my humorous Stilm “Welsh STDs” using GraphicConverter. [A Stilm is a STill fILM, a new word which I created. It is believed that Shakespeare put thousands of new words into the language; why cannot I add a few as well?]

The premiere was at a charity fundraiser for It’s Our City <http://www.itsourcity.org.uk/> in the Yorkie Bar in Lancaster < http://www.yorkshirehouse.enta.net/index.htm> The stilm was a mixture of JPEGs and two SWFs, and was very well received by the tiny audience. The SWFs were quite bizarre, each 64 seconds long, and with an audio component which repeated every 8 seconds.

I was asked to show it again at April’s Spotlight Club <http://www.spotlightlancaster.co.uk/> and, naturally, beforehand I wanted to improve on the original AND make sure everything was hunky dory. The images were fine; the SWFs wouldn’t play… or open. I downloaded SWF & FLV Player <http://mac.eltima.com/freeflashplayer.html> and they opened up perfectly with very high definition and crystal clear sound. Great, but still no way of incorporating them within GraphicConverter.

I phoned Apple Support to ask if Keynote would do the job; they advised me that, despite I having QuickTime Pro, if I wanted to get at the gubbins of the SWFs I would have to move back to QT7.2. According to Apple Support, this would entail uninstalling both QuickTime AND iTunes from my Mac, installing QT7.2, and doing whatever I needed to do to the SWFs. Afterwards, I could reinstall iTunes and upgrade to QT7.4.5. I was horrified! No, I wasn’t. I was gobsmacked! I certainly had no intention of going that crazy route.

As I have QT Pro 6 in Classic on my iBook G4. I opened the SWFs but they were silent. I attempted various export options but none saved the audio, just the video – and at a much lower resolution; all the text in the new videos was blurred. Eventually, I settled on ‘Export in DV’ format because it gave me a larger size albeit somewhat blurred. Some time previously, I had recorded the 8 second audio track with Audacity; I don’t know why as the audio is quite annoying. Maybe I just wanted something short to mess about with while exploring Audacity’s <http://audacity.sourceforge.net/> features because I found a version of it on my machine in which the Left track had been reversed. It sounded bizarre, although not as bizarre as the original SWF itself

I took the 8 second Audacity track, saved it as AIFF and opened it in QT7. QT’s Help files have a section “Adding an Audio Track to a QuickTime Movie” which is SO simple to follow: Open the the audio Select and Copy the audio Open the movie Choose Edit > Add. Save I saved it as MOV and it played properly in my Stilm.

One can only hope that a future update of QT will reintroduce SWF capabilities.

Oddities As QT files, the SWFs each were 196 kb. Having used Command-I to change them so they would open with SWF & FLV Player, they each became 244 kb. Using QT6 to convert them to DV files [of a much lower quality], they each grew to 222.8 Mb. Opening them in QT7, adding in the audio and saving as MOV reduced them to 12 kb each!

At the Spotlight Club when the stilm ended, the audience gave me a clap, NOT the clap.