How To Upload Jing To Screencast From Swf File

For the terminal few years, I've been using TechSmith'south Camtasia For Mac in society to tape my web development screencasts every bit MP4 video files. Prior to Camtasia, I was using some other TechSmith product called JING. JING was an awesome tool and made sharing screencasts super easy with its built-in file uploader; only, information technology generated its screencasts as Wink movies (SWF files). And, now that Flash is all but dead on the web, I have several years worth demos that are no longer viewable on this site. As such, I've begun the process of converting my JING SWF moving-picture show files into MP4 video files. Which, unfortunately, is going to be a labor-intensive, real-time procedure.

When I first started downwardly this path, I experimented with a number of online and offline "SWF to MP4" video conversion tools. And, they were all terrible. None of them came even close to producing a valid conversion file. If I was lucky, the generated file would accept the right dimensions. But, most of the tools didn't even get that correct.

In order to go a meliorate sense of why this conversion was and so hard, I downloaded the trial version of the Flash Decompiler by Trillix. And, once I opened upwardly one of the SWF movies, I was quickly able to see the problem: the JING movies don't actually incorporate whatsoever video assets:

The JING SWF files aren't "videos" in the traditional sense - they're "interactive movies". So, instead of embedded video avails, the JING SWF visuals are a blended of hundreds of epitome sprites that are animated across thousands of frames on the Flash timeline.

Because of this movie architecture, generating an MP4 video file requires playing back the SWF moving-picture show in realtime and, essentially, recording the output in the desired MP4 format. To do this, I purchased the SWF Converter For Mac by iOrgSoft. This product does exactly that - information technology plays the SWF movie in realtime and records the audio and visual output:

On of the problem with this - and one that I don't call back I tin get around - is that the JING picture is truly interactive. Significant, it doesn't auto-play: as the consumer of the SWF movie, I have to hit the Play push to showtime the embedded demo. This is why the JING controls show upwards when I get-go the conversion:

And then, for each conversion, I have to start the conversion procedure, click the Play push in the movie while it's existence recorded, and then quickly mouse-out of the video so that the JING playback controls will know to fade-away. This will result in an MP4 video file that contains the original JING controls (as seen hither in Quicktime):

The bottom scrubber is the Quicktime playback. That giant Play button in the center is the JING tooling that is now forever-embedded in the converted MP4 video file.

This is a bummer. Not only is this going to be a time-intensive, transmission, non-scriptable procedure; but, I don't recollect there'due south any way around information technology. Since the JING SWF file is a video-free, "interactive pic" that actually requires user-interaction in society to run, I think the SWF Converter for Mac is going to be my best bet. The saving grace of this process is that I tin can start the conversion procedure and then movement the converter to the groundwork so that I can do other piece of work. The SWF Converter won't option up any figurer sounds or music - it just records the audio coming out of the SWF motion picture. And so, i little victory at that place is that information technology's fairly isolated.

This seems similar a great scenario for Amazon'south Mechanical Turk. But, since this chore needs licensed software, I recollect this going to end up beingness a one-man brute-force effort.

Source: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/3398-converting-techsmith-jing-swf-movies-to-mp4-videos.htm

Posted by: wadsworththentim.blogspot.com