Camstudio SWF Producer creates .swf's that play back ridiculously slow.

December 4, 2007 4:48 PM

Camstudio SWF Movie Producer takes my .avi and converts it without error to an .swf... but it it plays back the Flash movie waaaaaaay too slow - even if I alter the fps before I render the .avi. Help!

So ya, I'm using that freeware Camstudio screen capture-movie thing that you can currently still get at Sourceforge, in Win Xp. System resources are not taxed at all, that I can tell, during this procedure and everything seems to run smoothly.

I get the thing into Vegas, do my edits there, add audio, and render at either 30 or 20fps. Those both render fine and playback on the movie player of my choice, AND play back in Camstudio SWF Movie Producer just fine - before I render to Flash. I did the 20 fps based on another guy's suggestion that this problem was occurring because the SWF-maker was wanting 20 fps for Flash and not 30, and also because he said the Flash file(s) would be humonstrous otherwise.

Either way, converting the thing to the .swf results in a file that plays back wayyyyyy too slowly - like at maybe 10 or 15% of the original recorded speed.

Anyone? I'm running out of ideas and time!! Thank you so much, mefites.

posted by bitterkitten to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Any reason why you have to render it out as a .swf? Usually for "movie" type things .flv (flash video) will give much better results.
posted by 543DoublePlay at 4:56 PM on December 4, 2007

543DoublePlay, on my system there's no app which knows what to do with "FLV".
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:41 PM on December 4, 2007

I dunno, it was suppose to be a pretty painless process... ?

when I attempting converting to .flv using Flash 8, it resulted in a nice blank white screen as the end product (who knows if i know wtf i'm doing with Flash 8, tho).
posted by bitterkitten at 7:42 PM on December 4, 2007

.flv files run through an .swf "wrapper" and usually include things like a play/pause button, scrub bar etc. Because flv files are web deliverd, the output to .flv should include the html file that everything runs inside of. If you want to run an flv by itself you will need a 3rd party player like... flv player.

My very old version of Camtasia Studio (v3) allows you to output to flv (which it says is preferable for long, high motion video) and outputs a nice little package of files ready for throwing up on the web.

Aren't all Youtube videos flv files when you download them?
posted by worker_bee at 5:58 AM on December 5, 2007

Hm, dunno. So you can't run an .flv, that you just created in Flash, in Flash itself?

Weird....

Either way, somebody must be still using this thing besides me.

Thanks for your input so far, peoples!
posted by bitterkitten at 7:43 AM on December 5, 2007

This may be a good link
Flash uses Actionscript to call the .flv file and play it within the Flash (.swf) 'wrapper'.
posted by worker_bee at 7:52 AM on December 5, 2007

well, i scoured the net for other .avi to .swf converters that were free, found this one (which is not as robust as the Camstudio one, but at least it WORKED for the conversion) - my converted .avi plays back fine in Flash. Go figure.

'free video to flash converter'

yeah it looks like it could be some kinda ad-infested thing, but so far, so good.... :p
posted by bitterkitten at 10:11 PM on December 5, 2007