15-Minute Reviews :: Flash Decompiler v2.99

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Flash Decompiler version 2.99 by Eltima Software – An application to allow you to take a SWF file and extract resources or decompile to a FLA file.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Flash Decompiler is a powerful SWF to FLA converter with functionality to decompile Flash movies, convert SWF elements into multiple formats and replace them on the go. With an ease of one click you can store sounds, images, videos, shapes, frames, morphs, fonts, texts, buttons, sprites and ActionScripts from any SWF file directly to your hard drive.

You can export Flash Video to AVI and FLA, save sounds as WAV and MP3, images – as PNG, JPEG and BMP, texts as RTF, TXT and HTML. Flash Decompiler by Eltima lets you convert the whole SWF file or only shapes, images, sounds, morphs and texts into FLA. Projector EXE files are decompiled the same easy way as common SWF files. Flash Decompiler will give you detailed information about shapes, images, morphs etc., also tracking their placements in frames and sprites and even reflecting original names of frames, ActionScripts and sprites. Unique SWF Replacer feature of Flash Decompiler enables replacing sounds, images, colors, gradients and lines to make changes to SWF files even without previous conversion.”

Quick Pros

• Interface easy to navigate
• Ability to export individual components a great plus
• Ability to change objects colors in application
• Conversion happens fast
• Comes with SWF Capture Tool for Internet Explorer

Quick Cons

• ‘Replace SWF Objects’ button a bit confusing
• Few shapes converted poorly – Green blobs, lost color or color merged to lines
• Second test came out destroyed no matter what settings

Expansion

Even before the advent of FLV files, Adobe Flash offered the ability to create animations easily and quickly. There are plenty of animations out there, and still to this date are being produced heavily. This application is a helper for those who wish to reverse the compile process of Flash to allow you to extract resources or extract to a workable FLA file.

First off, while the interface looks a little dated, it is easy to use and get running. The primary buttons are along the top of the screen; The user manual will be helpful for ensuring you get the correct conversion settings and knowing what each setting is for. The file explorer is on the left, resource bar for choosing resources for export and so forth. The center is a preview of the animation and tag information.

As mentioned a moment ago, this application has the ability to export individual parts of the movie as well as the entire movie. This gives an artist quick access to their art instead of having to go wading through folders of artwork.

On the topic of art, there is an interesting feature in this application; The ability to change coloring of objects in the application itself. I am assuming this was likely incorporated to help with the color issue (See below). You can open up each item and recolor to some degree depending on the original file’s complexity and so forth. That said, finding this feature was a little difficult to find because the button to it is called ‘Replace SWF Objects’ which would lead me to think of another ability, and not recoloring and the other features here.

There are a lot of options for this application for actual conversion to attempt to minimize destruction of the SWF file as it converts back to FLA. As the application notes, I must stress that you should read the user manual, at least on the conversion options. There is a lot here that you can end up breaking if you aren’t careful. When I finished setting up, conversion went very fast; Matter of seconds to convert a fairly complex SWF file.

My first conversion I did do blindly without reading the manual – All went pretty smoothly except a few small glitches; Some were corrected on the second run without much issue. However, the problem I ran into was that a few random objects either became a solid green color or the line color was replaced with the fill color and the fill color was gone. I tried quickly to fix the green shapes using the recolor feature, but they had no line or fill data; Just one big green blob. I couldn’t seem to find the other error in Flash Decompiler so I am not sure what happened there (Though granted, 2000 symbols and shapes, I may have flipped past it.) For the most part though, most of the glitches were a quick fix; Just having to fix symbols that are beyond repair might be daunting.

On my second run, I actually ran the resulting SWF file from yesterday’s review and tried to see how that went; This conversion went over very badly; It caught the Play button and the intro screen without text (Even when I did change the settings a few times) but once it moved into the animation of the images section, there was nothing at all, and the audio croaked very ungracefully. We could chalk this up to being built by a non-compliant Flash output though.

Final Verdict

All-in-all, the application is a great concept. I used a decompiler once a few back to recover one of my business Flash files and it didn’t work at all. This application recovers a good portion of the Flash file so long as it has been built by Adobe Flash. If you are really in a pinch, or just want to see how a Flash file was made, this may be a handy program. For free, this application would be good to test for your needs, but be sure you understand there might be issues, and the resulting file will not be exactly like the original due to SWF limitations. As for paying $59.95, I am unsure if I would purchase this without demoing it for my purposes; It would be difficult to spend this much knowing that there is a chance that there is going to be a fair bit of work recovering the entire FLA file (Granted, it would be great for recovering specific objects.) If there was some way to better recover the green and mis-colored objects at least, it would be worth it definitely for many.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, July 17, 2007