Re: [Swftools-common] Preview JPEG of a SWF

[Benjamin Wolsey]

> At what point in a dynamic swf ought one to take a static jpeg snapshot of a
> snapshot of the dynamic SWF inside that, and the dynamic swf inside that, and
> the dynamic swf inside that.. und se weite, und se weite, und se weite.. and
> have the result be representative of the swf as a whole.  Right?

Yes, this is one of the points about the complexity of creating a
preview automatically.

I'd summarize the issues as follows:

What a SWF looks like at any point in its timeline is dependent on many
factors, both 'static' (i.e. parsed from the SWF file) and
'dynamic' (i.e. controlled by ActionScript execution or external events
like user input or loading).

a) At which point in time is what you see in front of you when playing
the file representative of the whole SWF?
b) What tool can you use to compose the frame as it as at that point in
time, taking all those external factors into account, and export it as
an image?

> If the resulting swf was document style, then no problem.  Game or multimedia 
> output would be way trickier, nigh impossible, or downright stupid, i.e. say 
> the
> dynamic content was a wav file or streamed mp3.   I doubt anyone would expect 
> a tool such as pdf2swf to handle it, let alone attempt to use it.

I don't think anyone was suggesting using pdf2swf!

> If Gnash makes swf stop motion capture easier, then great.  Can it also 
> export at a
> suitable break point to JPEG?  Why JPEG, or more correctly JFIF?  

It only supports PNG export currently, but converting this to JPEG is
possible with further tools.

> Finally, a similar effect could also be obtained by controlling the swf 
> playback  with actionscript/swfc, then dumping the appropriate frame.  Only 
> thing missing
> is the final graphic export.  I'm sure that could be got round.

Controlling playback using a wrapper SWF would surely be possible (with
roughly the same problems that a player would have). I can think of one
way of exporting a frame as a jpeg, but it's not pretty: draw the movie
to a BitmapData, send the pixel data to a server, and convert it there!

Maybe AS3 has some better way, but the Adobe Flash player isn't known
for its openness and ease of extension!

bwy

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Benjamin Wolsey, Software Developer - http://benjaminwolsey.de
C++ and Open-Source Flash blog - http://www.benjaminwolsey.de/bwysblog

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