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SilverX converts Flash video to Silverlight

by Jay Hathaway on August 14, 2009 at 12:00 PM

SilverX is a Windows app that converts Flash (.SWF) videos to Microsoft's Silverlight format. It recognizes all the vectors, images, text and animations from the original Flash file, so you can extract all of those elements and edit them in a Silverlight app later. If you want to manipulate the individual elements, you can edit them like any other Silverlight solution, and even apply XAML. If you just want to play the movie back in your browser using Silverlight, you can do that too.

There's not a lot of fiddling necessary to use SilverX. Just pick a SWF file and an output directory, and everything happens under the hood. You can either output the file as a standalone app or a Silverlight solution. To work with solutions, you'll need Microsoft's Expression Blend 3 or Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

[via AddictiveTips]

Tags: convert, flash, silverlight, silverx, swf, vector, video, xaml

Comments

DeathSeekerAug 14th 2009 4:21PM

Neutral

You'd think they would have called it Flashlight.

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Money MikeAug 14th 2009 1:46PM

Neutral

I know withe latest Silverlight, videos look better than Flash video, but I'm not sure what the other capabilities are for Silverlight.

As far as video is concerned, if you've converted it to a Flash format, the video has already lost some quality. Since converting it to Silverlight won't make the quality better (I would think), I can't see what the advantage of converting would be.

My guess is that I'm missing something here and video is either just a small piece of the puzzle or not even part of this at all. Can somebody fill me in?

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rokubungiAug 14th 2009 3:41PM

Neutral

all I know is that silverlight supports graphics hardware acceleration and flash does not.. or so I've heard.

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bigsoftyAug 14th 2009 8:01PM

Neutral

Hmmm, Silverlight is no where near as popular as flash or as feature capable... why the hell would anyone want to convert from a well supported format to another less supported one?

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peegeeAug 16th 2009 11:18PM

Neutral

because it's the next best thing?

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whiskeyAug 16th 2009 11:35PM

Neutral

Do you mean that this contraption disassembles SWFs and then translates the outcome to Silverlight assets? Yeah, it's bound to be trouble!

Because, as a developer, you would not need that to be extracted from the SWF but from the FLA files instead.

By the way, an SWF file is not a video file. Back then, when we had no FLV video, SWF flipped through heavily compressed JPG files and played the synced MP3 audio. Nowadays SWF files are used to play either FLV video and MP4.

Now, this seems to be intended to be used with SWF animations, which is not exactly video, but animated vectors and such.

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