Compressing SWF files...

[Barely Human]

Ok, i am currently building a new flash site, and its gonna end up fairly big. I already have it compressed from the export options, but im wondering if there is any progs out there that can compress the file even more??

Anyone know any?

[MangaFish]

other than using common sence (ie not having 2 sound files in the SWF that sound the same, but use one for all the scenes etc) i dont think there is a way. SWF feature films take an age to downlaod.

to be honnest though, i try to keep my contract with flash to a minimum as i find SWF's unfriendly for tab browsing

[Tyrisia]

I'm building a flash site with 3d art using Swift 3d, and that's gonna be a big file as well when it's finished. A sort of way round it that I'm using is to have the main movie contain all art and nav buttons, and then load each page individually (with preloader) into a target movieclip on the main timeline. This won't reduce d/l time, but will get your site to the viewer faster initially, and the pages will cache on the viewers computer, so will obviously load instantly on the second view..

As for external software for compression, I've had a look round and can't find any, but u'll know about flashkit.com, there's a few good tutes on file optimization there.

[Barely Human]

Cheers for that.. I knew that there wouldnt be much i could do to the file, and putting preloaders in for each scene now would be a major task to do. Its a shame that you can G-Zip flash files :cry:

[MangaFish]

maybe you could source the audio externally so you could stream it once the SWF has initiated. i have a feeling thats easy enough to do in flash but never actually needed to

[Tyrisia]

If there's audio in there, save it as an external swf file, but set the sync option to stream. Encode at 32kbs for dialup, or whatever u want for broad, then reference these external files using the loadmovie function (loadMovie("track.mp3", "musicmovieclip")) into a target movieclip in your main movie (usually I just put an empty movieclip offstage with the relevant name). I think u'll find it streams brilliantly (better than real in my opinion) with the correct encoding. ;)

[distek]

found this today, aint tryed it yet. hope its usefull ;)

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/swf-compressor-Download-379.html

[Tyrisia]

Found some software compression tools:

Optimaze

Flash Optimiser

I'm usin the second but have tested both, and they can compress by upto 70%! Only really good on standard vector stuff, not very good on embedded bitmaps, they compress the vectors via advanced algorithms.