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New Participant
January 7, 2021
Answered

Viewing SWF after December 31st 2020

  • January 7, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 38533 views

Greetings and salutations. Over the last several decades I've aquired many animations from various artists that all use the .swf format. How am I going to continue to watch and enjoy these now that Flash is dead?

    3 replies

    jeromiec83223024
    Community Manager
    jeromiec83223024Community ManagerCorrect answer
    Community Manager
    January 11, 2021
    Nancy OShea
    Community Expert
    January 7, 2021

    Flash Player is dead because browsers killed plugins for security reasons.

    You'll be hard pressed to find any browsers that will support Flash content off the Internet.

     

     

     

    Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert
    January 7, 2021

    Flash is not dead. An attempt at murder happened but the will of the people decide.

     

    There are several solutions.

     

    You can use a Standalone Flash / SWF Player so you can load your saved swf files in. Then play them offline. There are many. Each with their own quirks and incompatabilities. A good one however can play most swf files more or less as originally intended.

     

    The Flash player from adobe can be found here and is named Flash Player projector https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html

     

    Have sites that have not already update themselves to playback swfs as a different format like webassembly. Ruffle.rs is commonly used for this. It is currently a work in progress and there are also several others doing more or less the same. The idea is it takes a flash file, loads it as webassembly, then plays it like normal with no loss of any kind. Since its played in webassebly it cant be saved properly anymore (far as I know) and the flash security issues that supposedly existed in the past are fixed this way. Also some swf should extend to mobile devices because of that. Im having issues using it with firefox though.

     

    Use another player for playing flash files in browser. I have had success doing so with SuperNova SWF Enabler while using the Chrome browser.

     

    You can also look into https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ a swf archive and list. With it I hear you can play swfs, add swfs, and request the archiving of swfs.

     

    The Internet Archive is also archiving swfs. I encourage you to add to them.

     

    Then there are the chan sites with their flash / swf torrents.

    llloyd4Author
    New Participant
    January 7, 2021

    So the stand alone, like Flash Player Projector, will work wiithout Flash installed on my computer? Ok, cool. Some of them have multiple paths and will pop up buttons now and again, otherwise I'd see if there is a way to convert them to .webm. As for archiving them, umm, a lot of them aren't, how do I put this delicately... Not kid friendly. >.> Don't know if they'd go for that, otherwise I'd just point the Wayback Machine to the artist's web page or archive up the stuff the artist's website has vanished into the void.