How to Capture Flash Video and Animation (FLV and SWF Files)

Now that almost everybody is surfing the Net with a high speed broadband connection, there's a ton of great video out there. And more and more sites are using Flash Video as their streaming video solution of choice.

Flash appears in two ways: animations (SWF files) and video files (FLV files). What if you want to capture these flash videos? And how do you play them back? This article tells you how to do it.

Here's how to capture Flash Videos or Animations:

  1. Go grab a copy of Replay A/V from Applian Technologies. This is simply the best tool for recording all kinds of online media, and it works great for Flash as well.
  2. Open Replay A/V. It appears like this:



  3. Play the video you want to record. If you've already played it recently, you can skip this step. Once the video has finished downloading it will reside on your PC in the browser cache. Wait for the video to finish downloading or playing.
  4. From the menu, click Record, Stream Capture. The video you just played appears in the cache list:




  5. Click Add Selection as New Show. You'll see the video appear in Replay A/V ready to record:



  6. You can rename the show by editing the Name of Show field.
  7. You can also have the video converted to a different file format by choosing an After Recording, Convert to option.
  8. Click Record Now, then OK. This starts the capture. You can see the progress of the capture in the Replay A/V window like this:




  9. Once the video finishes recording you can play the recording by left clicking on the name of the video and scrolling down to Play recording button Play Last Recording like this:

    Play Last Recording


    The video will appear like this:

    Flash Player


Here's how to Play Captured Flash Animation (SWF files):

Normally, you can just double-click the .swf file, and it will open in Flash Player on your PC. There are a ton of free and commercial SWF file players available on the Web as well.

Note: Not all Flash Video can be captured. Some sites copy protect their video with DRM (Digital Rights Management). If you want to record these, you'll need to use a Screen Capture Video program like Replay Screencast.

Learn More:


Click here to learn more about capturing FLV files with Replay A/V