SWF

Revision as of 04:38, 11 April 2015

SWF is a multipurpose multimedia format widely used on the web. It is also known by many other names (often conflated with the names of SWF players), such as Flash, Adobe Flash, Macromedia Flash, Shockwave Flash, and FutureSplash.

Fundamentally it is an animated vector graphics format, but it has many other features, and can contain complete computer programs written in ActionScript. Among its common uses are advertisements, web site user interfaces, video games and other applets, and video playback. This format is famously not supported by Apple's iOS devices, leading Web developers to support alternative means of accomplishing such things as video playing, such as those provided in HTML 5.

SWF is not designed to be editable. Instead, SWF files are usually compiled from a source (project) format called FLA. The ActionScript programming language is also used.

Disambiguation

SWF is not the same format as the one known as Shockwave, Adobe Shockwave, Macromedia Shockwave, or Shockwave for Director.

In personal ads, SWF means "Single White Female", while the airport code SWF refers to the Stewart airport in Newburgh, New York. Neither of these has any particular relevance to file formats, however.

Identifiers

Identification

SWF files begin with a 3-byte ASCII signature:

• "FWS" is for uncompressed files.
• "CWS" is for files that use zlib compression.
• "ZWS" is for files that use LZMA compression.

See also

• FLV

Specifications

• SWF File Format Specification, Version 19
• SWF File Format Specification, Version 10
• SWF File Format Specification, Version 9 (from archive.org)

Software

• Adobe Flash Player
• Gnash
• Lightspark
• Shumway (Flash VM / runtime in JavaScript)
• 7-Zip can convert compressed SWF to uncompressed SWF.

Links

• Wikipedia: SWF
• Wikipedia: Adobe Flash
• Wikipedia: FutureSplash Animator
• Flash Player and Adobe AIR feature list
• SWF format mini-poster
• Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool