How do I play Flash on the player?

Overview

IAdea media players do not offer native Flash support, therefore Flash media contents must be converted into video before being played. Make sure you acquire the original Adobe Flash .fla work files, not the .swf distribution files. The latter type may result in degraded presentation quality.

Limitation

If you only have the .swf (Flash run-time) file, which is not supported by the official Adobe Flash authoring tool, you will need 3rd party conversion tools. While there are commercially available software that claim to convert .swf, most exhibit frame loss during the conversion process, especially for HD content.

Step 1: Converting .fla into Uncompressed AVI in Adobe Flash

Make sure you have the .fla project files, as .swf files cannot be converted.

Adobe's official website provides instructions on how to export the .fla file as a Windows AVI file. When exporting, select 480p for the SD players (CMP/NMP), 720p or 1080p for the HD players (HMP/XMP). (You can watch a video screencast on exporting to QuickTime video format. But for our purposes, remember to choose the AVI format instead of QuickTime.)

Note that the exported video is frame-perfect (i.e., no frame drops). It is saved as an “uncompressed” AVI file and is HUGE. 1 minute of uncompressed AVI may be several GBs in size. Due to its massive size and bit-rate, few devices can play the file smoothly. This will no longer be the case once we compress the video in the next step.

Step 2: Transcoding Uncompressed AVI into player-optimized formats

Once the uncompressed video is created, you will have to transcode the video to play on specific players. See Converting videos with WinMEnc for the tools and process of conversion.