Advanced Flash Player

Even though SWF videos are commonly used on the Internet, only a small variety of media players can render them. As its name states, Advanced Flash Player is an application capable of playing SWF video files, but it can also open JPEG images.

The user interface is easy to navigate; it consists of the player window and a sidebar that shelters all the user controls. As the 'drag and drop' method is not supported, you have to import a video using the file browser or by manually entering a video URL.

Advanced Flash Player comes with a built-in browsing utility, which you can use to extract Flash movie URLs and watch them in the main window of the program.

You have basic media player tools at your disposal, such as pausing, reloading or fast-forwarding the video, switch to full-screen mode, as well as navigate back and forth through the frames. Besides that, you can choose to view the video without its borders, stretch the image or increase its vector quality.

Optionally, detailed information about the video can be displayed, including the number of frames per second and its estimated length. You can also zoom in and out, set the quality (low, medium, high) and configure the Flash settings (for example, enable hardware acceleration).

The program allows you to create your own media library by searching our local drives for compatible Flash files and images. Only whole drives can be scanned, so you cannot scan a single directory. Once the scanning process is completed, double-clicking on any of the found files plays it with Advanced Flash Player.

Although it can play most of the video files smoothly, the application may crash on some occasions. It lacks some functions that other similar programs do have. For instance, you cannot create custom playlists or configure image settings (contrast, saturation etc.).

Advanced Flash Player is a straightforward and very easy to handle program for playing Flash video files and that is the reason why it is recommended mainly to first-time users. It comes equipped with a few useful features, but also lack more advanced ones that limit it from fully living up to expectations.