I’m trying to convert a file that I created in Flash CS5 into a format that can be played on a mobile phone. I’ll explain the background to this: one of my students wants to create a series of animations that will be sent via text message from a local business to their customers. A person will open the text message and the animation will begin to play. He’s using Flash CS5 to create the animation and some basic ActionScript to make it stop at the end. The template he used was the iOS for AIR template.
Could anyone point me in the right direction to get us started in exporting this correctly, maybe a couple of hints with the publishing settings or some coding tips? Or is this not possible? I’m sure I’ve received a text message in the past from my mobile service provider that had an embedded movie in it that played on opening.
You’re going about this the wrong way. You can’t embed flash in a text message any more than you can embed html in one. What you need is an MMS multimedia message. You’ll need to convert your animation to a video type suitable for the restrictions of the MMS format and then send it via a service such as clickatell’s web api.
I figured that as much. Thinking back to the message that I referred to in my original post, I now recall having to open the file to view it. I don’t do a lot of work with mobile phones, but I was aware that Flash doesn’t work on iOS. Maybe this is something I should read into further - any good books you guys can recommend?
So basically, I should make a compatible file and send it as MMS? Cool. I’ll look into that. Thanks for getting me started on the right track. If anyone can recommend any good books or articles, I’d really appreciate it.
Books on Apple’s feud w/ Flash (for some mystical reason)? Eh - no, but I’m sure you could Google some articles.
As to what to do, it it’s just an animation, you could export it from Flash, import it to any professional movie-editing suite, and then export it as an mp4, or any of the HTML5 video codecs.
Only h.264 has widespread support on mobiles, if you are sending a message to a web link (that will open in the mobiles video player after a recipient clicks it) Embedded MMS video is typically transcoded to 3gp by the MMS gateway, and the file size limit is very small (usually around 300k).
Yes h.264 is the best option for mobile use - but it has to be particular with regards to encoding parameters, I recall you can only use ‘base’ rather than the ‘mainline’ profile at a maximum level 3.0, as this lower level of decoding complexity is all that iphones support.