Today on Flash websites animations are everywhere: graphic animations, streaming music, games, advertisements, slide presentations and many applications. For example, we have reported some of the very nice flash animation sites that I recommend looking at.
The use of the Flash plugin on a browser is therefore mandatory for everyone, today, to browse and see the best websites.
A flash animation that exists on a site is embedded in a file called SWF (which stands for Small Web Format or ShockWave Format).
Any application or flash animation can be viewed on any internet browser by installing the Adobe Flash Player which also includes the Shockwave player that was once Macromedia and today has been absorbed by Adobe.
The animations of the SWF files, if downloaded to the PC, can also be played by Windows Media Player and be viewed without an internet connection to incorporate them, for example, on Powerpoint presentations or to keep them if you like them.
Downloading a SWF file to PC is often possible from many web pages, except if the site hides its origin or if it is an interactive animation that, if downloaded offline, does not work.
In this post we see how you can download SWF files from any site, easily and without using external programs, with all browsers, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome and save the animation on your computer.
Downloading a SWF file using Firefox means going to the internet page that contains the flash file, and letting go of the entire stream at least once.
On any empty part of the page, click with the right mouse button and select the "Information" item from the context menu; alternatively you can also go to the top Tools menu and press "Page information".
In the information sheet of the site, you can go to the "Media" part and look for the "SWF" type files that are embedded in the page.
At the end, just highlight the file by clicking on it and then go to Save to save the file on the hard disk of the PC.
With Internet Explorer the matter is slightly more laborious because you have to go and look for the swf file in the temporary files of the browser cache.
In Windows 7 temporary files are found by going to the top menu, clicking on Tools - Internet Options. In the General tab, press on Settings in the History section and, in the next window, press the "view file" button. In the billion objects and rows that are displayed, put the view for details and the order of the rows by "type". Among these files there is also the swf just seen on a website. Since by default the file formats are not recognized on Windows, this detail must be enabled by going to the folder options from the tools menu and removing the flag, in the display tab, under "Hide extensions for known files". Now, scrolling through the list, you should find the swf file (you can also use the search and write * .swf) that you can copy and paste in another folder on your computer.
With Opera, with Edge and with Chrome the download of SWF movies and animations are really simple and fast:
Downloading the SWF file on Chrome Opera and Edge is a matter of two seconds and I could summarize it like this: on the page with the flash animation, Press CTRL-U then CTRL-F, write swf, scroll the blue underlined parts that are links and press on it with the right button of the mouse saving the link on the computer. Basically it is possible to extract the flash file directly from the source code of the website.
This method does not work with all sites as some protect their games and content.
Once the .swf file is downloaded, it can be opened normally with Chrome, Firefox or any other browser.
A program to open SWF files offline is Flash Offliner which transforms that file making the game playable directly. Once downloaded and installed, an icon will appear on the taskbar (taskbar at the bottom right) indicating Flash Offliner and by clicking on it with the right mouse button you will see the available games and the options menu. By clicking on " Create New Flash Offliner Package " you can select the previously downloaded swf file and start creating the package that will be the game's executable. The new file will be called nome_gioco.fop. To play the game you must now right click on the FlashOffliner icon in the takbar and choose the game. The game resolution will default to 800 × 600 pixels but you can decide on other resolutions (400 × 300, 640 × 480, 1024 × 768) or play in full screen.
Finally, for those who wish to create flash animations but do not know how to do it, I would like to point out the web application of the Wix website which allows you to create flash internet sites but which can also be used to draw flash animations without much effort and without knowing anything about programming code .
