Swivel

Swivel is a video conversion utility that accepts Adobe Flash SWF files as input and generates an MP4 video clip with user-defined quality parameters.

While the interface might seem a bit different from that of all video converters, the steps you must follow in order to convert your multimedia files are essentially the same. The application enables you to convert individual videos or merge multiple clips into a single output file.

You can select the frame range to convert, which can prove really useful for videos that carry a pre-loader, since these sections can be practically ignored. The small preview window can help you identify the frames you want to keep and the ones you want to skip. Alternatively, you can manually start and stop the recording process.

Swivel features render quality control options and bitmap smoothing, while also enabling you to customize the bitrate and select the video codec that will be used during the encoding operation. It enables you to customize the video size, which directly affects its quality. Input Flash files can be resized or cropped to fit the set dimension.

The application is capable of extracting the audio stream from the source SWF file, but you can instruct it to get it from an external track and merge the content with the video. It supports mono and stereo channels and enables you to configure the audio bitrate and the codec type.

Additional options allow you to apply a watermark image onto the video, set its position, size and adjust its transparency.

The conversion speed is rather slow, although sometimes the application froze during our tests. While waiting for the operation to complete, you can enjoy viewing the original video.

Swivel can generate MP4 clips out of your SWF videos, without neglecting playback quality. While it could use some improvements regarding speed, it is a viable tool for encoding SWF files.