Why SWF files do not work with Windows 10? You can find some excellent SWF animation, sound or even games, which contain interactive features to enjoy fun. What should be the best SWF file players to play SWF videos, games and animations on Windows 10 or Mac?

The article shares the top 7 SWF players to view SWF files in a full screen, set the playback quality, and even take advantage of the videos and vectors based animations and games. Just learn more about the programs and get a desired one according to your requirement.

Part 1: Top 7 SWF Players to Play SWF Files

• Apr 15, 2021 Install Adobe Flash Player from Adobe's website. Installing Adobe Flash Player on your Mac is needed because Flash is not built into Safari. Make sure you've installed the app before moving forward with this method.
• SWF is an Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and Action Script. Originating with Future Wave Software, then transferred to Macromedia, and then coming under the control of Adobe. SWF files can contain animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function.
• Adobe Flash Player for Mac, free and safe download. Adobe Flash Player latest version: Adobe Flash Player for Mac - Play anything! Adobe Flash Player is a free software program to play Shockwave.

In order to play SWF animations, games and videos on Windows 10 or Mac, here are top 7 SWF video players you can take into consideration.

Top 1: Versatile SWF Player for Windows 10 – Free Blu-ray Player

When you need a SWF player to enjoy all video formats, such as HD videos, DVDs and even Blu-Ray discs, Free Blu-ray Player is able to watch all file formats with excellent video effect and 100% image quality.

Adobe Swf Player Mac Software

Pros

Now that SWF and FLV have been discontinued, it’s especially important to find a functioning flash video player Mac app. Elmedia Player is up to the task. Unlike your average Flash projector, Elmedia combines full SWF/FLV support with useful features that may be found in an ordinary Flash player.

• 1. Compatible with SWF, FLV, WebM, MP4, WMV, and more than 300 video/audio formats.
• 2. Play the video different screen modes, like full, half, normal, double, etc.
• 3. Capture the desired screenshot for the videos during the playback process.
• 4. Intuitive interface and excellent controls to manage the videos with ease.

Cons

• 1. Upgrade to the Pro version to get more other features of the SWF player.

Top 2: Default SWF Player for PC/Mac – Adobe Flash Player

SWF is an Adobe flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript. Adobe Flash Player is the default SWF player and browse plug-in to view flash videos, games and animations.

Pros

• 1. Support SWF files with vector/3D graphics, embedded video and audio.
• 2. Compatible with smartphones, tablets, PC, Mac and various devices.
• 3. Work with videos with H.264 video codec and HE-AAC audio codec.

Cons

• 1. The stability problems and crash issues should be the major drawback.
• 2. Frequent updates for the SWF player is another annoying problem.

Top 3: Smart and Simple SWF Player for PC – SWF Player

Just as the name of the program, SWF Player is a simple and smart external flash player, which is dedicated in playing local SWF videos, games and other files without connecting to the Internet.

Pros

• 1. It is a lightweight SWF video player with less than 1 MB total in size.
• 2. Basic features to stop, rewind, play, pause, forward and loop SWF files.
• 3. Go to any frame via the simple scroll bar feature to play the videos.

Cons

• 1. Limited to SWF/FLV formats and basic video playback functionalities.
• 2. Create some problem while playing movies that access external data.

Top 4: SWF Player for Flash Games for Windows 10 – GOM Player

When you need to play some flash games with SWF files, which you can watch and control with mouse or touch screen, GOM Player might be a nice SWF file player with advanced customization features.

Pros

• 1. Play some broken or under-loaded files and able to find missing codecs.
• 2. Open and watch the SWF files from YouTube and other online streaming.
• 3. GOM remoter to remote access to control playback over desktop player.

Cons

• 1. It only provides the basic user interface to playback the SWF video files.
• 2. Need some firewall tweaking to get rid of occasional Ads in free version.

Top 5: Flexible SWF Player for Mac – Elmedia Player for Mac

If you are looking for an excellent SWF player for MacBook, Elmedia Player for Mac is the desired one to watch the SWF movies and animations with preferred brightness and color contrast.

Pros

• 1. Support auto-adjust the aspect ratio and more to fit the image to the screen.
• 2. Add subtitles to SWF videos in SUB/IDX for AirPlay video files.
• 3. Integrate web-browsing support to watch online SWF video with ease.

Cons

• 1. Upgrade to the Pro version in order to download YouTube SWF files.
• 2. Complicated options and features difficult for non-tech savvy.

Top 6: Free SWF Players for Online Videos – VLC Media Player

When you want to watch the SWF files online from YouTube, Vimeo and other streaming sites, VLC Media Player is a notorious free SWF video player with multiple advanced features and settings.

Pros

• 1. Convert SWF videos to other video/audio formats for other devices.
• 2. Stream the files over the Internet and between different devices with ease.
• 3. Modify the sound settings to get the favorite audio and video files.

Cons

• 1. Do not work with Blu-Ray movies and few video file formats, such as HEVC.
• 2. Cannot work with DRM-protected files or even the discs of another region.

Top 7: Play SWF Files from Different Sources – KMPlayer

What should be the SWF file player if you need to play SWF files from FTP, URL or other channels? KMPlayer can open the SWF files located on your computer, from FTP, from URL and more other sources.

Pros

• 1. Support for videos, audios, pictures, playlists, subtitles and CD image.
• 2. Customize the SWF playback with 3D subtitles, screen control and more.
• 3. Provide a virtual storage space at disposal to watch SWF file anywhere.

Cons

• 1. The beginners would get lost in the context menu or preferences area.
• 2. Crash problems and compatibility issues should be a annoy drawback.

Part 2: How to Play SWF Files on Windows 10

How to play SWF videos on Windows 10 with the original quality? In order to get the best video quality, you can take Free Blu-ray Player to watch the SWF files for example.

Download and install Free Blu-Ray Ripper

Once you have installed the SWF player on your computer, you can launch the Free Blu-ray Player and click the “Open File” button to load the SWF files into the program. You can load multiple SWF files within the same time.

Adobe Flash Download Mac

Play the SWF files on Windows 10

When you load the SWF files into the program, the video files will play automatically. There are multiple controls to pause/resume videos, fast forward, back forward, adjust the audio volume and more.

Adjust the viewing mode for SWF files

Click 'Controls' column to select the movie title/chapter, then click 'Audio' or 'Video' column to adjust the audio/video track and even change the screen size to meet your audiovisual enjoyment.

Take screenshots for SWF videos

When you find some interesting screenshots of the SWF files, you can click the “Capture” button to get them down and save a photo format. Then click the destination folder to view the screenshots directly within the program.

Part 3: FAQs of Best Free SWF Player Review

1. How do I convert SWF to MP4?

For converting SWF to MP4, you should use AnyMP4 Video Converter Ultimate. It is the easy SWF to MP4 converter on Windows and Mac. Step 1. Click Add File to import one or more SWF files. Step 2. Select MP4 from the drop-down list of Profile. Step 3. Click Convert to start converting SWF to MP4. The detailed guide is here: How to convert SWF to MP4.

2. What is the best SWF player for Android?

There are various SWF players for Android, and you can find them from Google Play easily, VLC, SWF Player, Flash File Viewer, SWF Viewer, Photon Flash Player and Browser, Dolphin Video, and more. Which one is the best depends what you want.

3. What is SWF file?

SWF is an Adobe Flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript. Controlled by Adobe now, SWF files can contain animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function. Adobe makes available plugins, such as Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Integrated Runtime, to play SWF files in web browsers on many desktop operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux and ARM architecture (Google Chrome OS only).

4. Can VLC play SWF?

Yes, VLC can play SWF files. Just upgrade your VLC to the latest version, and click Media to select Open Files or Open Multiple Files to import the SWF files. Then VLC will play the SWF files automatically.

Conclusion

If you just find some interesting files or games in SWF format, you can always choose a desired SWF player to view the files with a high quality. Adobe Flash Player is the one for web browser. SWF Player is a light-weighted media player for Windows 10. GOM Player is able to play SWF games and all other SWF formats. Elmedia Player is the flexible SWF player for Mac. VLC Media Player helps you preview the SWF files online. KMPlayer is able to play SWF videos from FTP, URL and more other channels. How about a versatile SWF player supports all video formats? Free Blu-Ray Player is always a high-recommended SWF file player you should download and try.

Adobe Swf Player Mac Os

You might have noticed that so many security updates pushed out to Windows include updates to Adobe Flash.

Adobe Flash is a security risk that will not go away. Steve Jobs famously fought this web video player, because he did not want the Safari browser dependent on a third-party product. He even wrote an essay in 2010, that you can read here, explaining why Flash would never run on iOS or Mac OS. (Although Adobe wrote instructions for how to enable it there, since otherwise lots of media content would not work.)

Jobs and others pushed for an upgrade to the HTML standard to HTML5 to support video without Flash. That took some years to roll out. HTML5 supports the <VIDEO> and <AUDIO> HTML tags. That causes a browser to play a video or audio using its own native ability to do that. But many websites still use <EMBED> and <OBJECT> HTML which launches the Adobe Flash or Adobe Shockwave plugins.

So many people want to get rid of of Adobe Flash that there is even a website dedicated to that.
Netflix and YouTube support HTML5. YouTube also supports Flash as does Facebook. NetFlix also has its own player called SilverLight. But according to Fast Company, among the web sites that still require Adobe Flash include: HBO, NBC, CBS, Zynga, King, Showtime, Pandora, Spotify, Major League Baseball, Slacker Radio, Hulu, and the BBC.

Facebook’s security chief said, “It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.' Yet they still support it.

The Complex world of Video Formats
The HBO series Silicon Valley chronicles the life of the fictional tech guru Richard Hendricks who tries to navigate the complex work of clashing personalities and venture capitalism as he turns his new compression algorithm into a business.

Choosing the best compression algorithm is one reason there are so video formats. Each tries to minimize bandwidth, hence the need for compression, and stream video in a smooth manner that does not overwhelm the memory of the machine or fade into a few pixels when the internet slows.

YouTube uses the HTML5, H.264, and WebM formats. Adobe Flash and Shockwave support AVI, MPG, M1V, M2P, M2T, M2TS, MTS, TOD, MPE, MPEG, DV, DVI, FLV, and F4V. Shockwave supports its own format, SWF. Apple Quicktime has its own format too.

The Dangers of Adobe Flash and Shockwave
Not many websites use Adobe Shockwave anymore. Not only does it have security issues, it’s awkward because it causes the browser to load an external file, called a .dll on Windows and .so on Linux. (If you do that with an unsigned .dll it would throw up an error in Windows. Adobe Shockwave is signed by Microsoft.) A .dll is a security risk because that launches a new process with access to its own memory. Hackers use exactly that approach to gain access to the operating system.

Adobe Flash is different, but not much. That runs inside the same process and memory as the web browser. But frequent bugs in that software give hackers lots of opportunities to gain access to memory. When they do that, they can cause the browser to jump to a specific memory address and take control of the machine.

Adobe Flash in the Browser
Google says it will end support for Adobe Flash by the end of 2016, sort of. It will set the default preference in the browser to use HTML5. But the websites Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, Amazon, and Yahoo will still use Adobe Flash by default. Yet Google says it will slowly reduce the list of websites for which Flash is the default player in Chrome.

Already Flash does not run in Chrome on Android, iOS, or Mac OS. On Windows, Linux, or a Chromebook, in Chrome you can type this command to see it:

chrome://plugins/

And you will see:

Adobe Flash Player - Version: 22.0.0.209-r1
Shockwave Flash 22.0 r0

Go to this website and try to play this video to see if your browser supports HTML5. If it does not a message will appear.

HTML5 in the Web Page Source Code
If you look at the source code of a web page (In Chrome, click the right mouse button and then click View Source.), you can tell if the web page is loading Adobe Flash because you will see the <OBJECT> and <EMBED> HTML tags which could look something like these:
<embed src='/catgame.swf' quality='high'>
<object classid='clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000'>
<object type='application/x-shockwave-flash'>

That might not be easy to spot in all that JavaScript code.

Contrast that with the web page shown below, which is the link we showed you above. If you hover the mouse over that video and click Inspect Element you can see the HTML code. Below you can see that this video is using HTML5. Thus it using the browser’s native ability to play video. On the right side in the code window you can see that it says <VIDEO>.

Why has it taken so long to kill off Adobe Flash? It does not make sense why the big media companies in the USA and Europe would cling to that. But people need to remember that in the developing world people still have slow internet and they repair and then buy and sell old computers running Windows XP and Windows 7, which do not support HTML5, depending on what browser they have. So it would be logical to assume that TV stations and other media outlets in those countries would be using video streaming servers that use MP4 and older non-HTML5 formats.

That might explain some of that. But in the meantime we will continue to suffer hacking attacks as hackers continue to study Adobe Flash, and even Adobe PDF viewer, for security weaknesses, of which there have been plenty.