Viewing SWF after December 31st 2020

[llloyd4]

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?

[AA5FC3]

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.

[llloyd4]

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. 

[llloyd4]

Oh! I just tried the Flash Player Projector link you provided, it's broken. In Vivaldi browser it just said "Content Blocked" , in Edge it allowed me to run once and then threw up the Flash EOL page. 

[_maria_]

The Flash Projector is a standlone app to view SWF files, it's not a browser plugin, thus doesn't work on any browser.

[llloyd4]

Right, and when I tried to download it, it threw me to the EOL page instead of downloading it.

[_maria_]

What URL (page) did you go to and which file did you attempt to download?  I was able to successfully download the projector files (for both Mac and Windows) with no error.

[Wojtek G]

im able to download it here:

https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html

choose "Flash Projector Content Debugger" (version for your appropriate device)

[Wojtek G]

If you still get the same problem due to unknown reason, here is archived version of the page from december 31 2020 that definitely will work 

https://web.archive.org/web/20201231144810/https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads...

[_maria_]

'Content debugger' is for content developers to debug their projectds.  A regular user using the content debuger will encounter various errors making the viewing experience less enjoyable.

[Nancy OShea]

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.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

For completeness: 

https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/