Create image based off a SWF (flash) element on the page? PHP/Jquery/Javascript/HTML/FLASH

Question

Is there anyway to take take a "screenshot", "save" or "capture" the active SWF element on a page as an image? I'd like for users to be able to simply click a button on my page, instead of having to need to manually take a screenshot of the entire page and then crop the image to show only the SWF element.

I found a Jquery method, although I am unsure if it could work with SWF files. It basically captures an area of an Image element on the page and allows you to save that as a separate image. What I would need however, is to capture the SWF as the image instead. Note: I do not have access to the SWF code so I cannot achieve this using Actionscript or anything like that -it has to be purely done with PHP and Javascript.

Thanks for any ideas :)

Answer 1

I don't think that there is a way to do this from Javascript, but if you host those swf files on your own server you could create a wrapper swf which loads the swfs you want to screenshot dynamically and then draws them into a BitmapData object.

The snapshot process inside of the swf can be triggered from Javascript via ExternalInterface, after that you can either serialize the raw pixels or use a PNG or JPEG encoder inside the wrapper swf to convert the bitmapdata to a image file and then send that data back to Javascript via ExternalInterface. Or you use the FileReference class in the swf to save the image file directly on the user's hard drive - one caveat in this is though that in order to trigger the save process the user will have to click a button inside the swf (that's a security feature).

There is one more prerequisite and that is that the swfs that you load into the wrapper have to be hosted on the same domain as the wrapper swf, otherwise the security sandboy will not allow to take a bitmap snapshot of it.

Answer 2

Look at ByteArray.getPixels(0,0,stage.stageWidth,stage.stageHeight) or var b;BitMap = BitMapData(stageW,stageH).draw(stage), depending on your needs. Note that the above two lines are not proper code, just the correct object and function names written in shorthand and from my head.