DVR to SWF Converter
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Supports: DVR
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Need help?DVR to SWF: Two Retired Formats Meeting in the Middle
A .dvr file is almost always a Microsoft DVR-MS recording — the Windows Media Center format introduced with Windows XP Media Center Edition in 2004, wrapping MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or Dolby Digital audio inside an ASF container. SWF is Adobe's Shockwave Flash, later renamed Small Web Format. Neither is a format anyone would choose today, so it is worth being blunt about what this conversion is for before you run it.
Adobe ended Flash Player support on 31 December 2020 and pushed an update that blocked Flash content from running on 12 January 2021. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari removed the plug-in Flash relied on, so a SWF you create now will not open in any current browser. Convert to SWF only when a specific legacy system — an authoring tool, an offline kiosk, an archived courseware pipeline — genuinely requires that container. For anything else, DVR to MP4 is the right target and will look considerably better at the same size.
How to Convert DVR to SWF
- Upload Your DVR File: Drag the recording onto the page or click "Add Files". The extension check matches the literal string
dvr, so rename a.dvr-msfile first — the rename does not affect decoding, since the container is identified from the header inside the file. - Pick a Video Codec: The dropdown offers FLV and MJPEG, and the page resolves to FLV. Audio Codec has one entry, MP3, because that is the only audio the SWF muxer accepts.
- Set File Compression, Video resolution and Trim: With FLV selected you get Quality Preset (Highest through Lowest, with Very High (Recommended) flagged), Specific file size, Constant Bitrate, Constant Quality and Constraint Quality. Video resolution opens on Keep original; Trim can be set to Time Range with a Start time and a Duration.
- Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the
.swf. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public.
FLV or MJPEG: The Two Very Different Choices
| FLV (Sorenson Spark) | MJPEG | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An implementation of H.263 from the early 2000s, the codec Flash video was built on | Every frame stored as an independent JPEG, no interframe prediction at all |
| Compression | Interframe — only changes between frames are stored | Intraframe only — each frame costs a full picture |
| Typical size | Much smaller | Substantially larger; a six-second 720 x 576 test recording came out 1.71 times the FLV file |
| Compression controls offered | Quality Preset, Specific file size, Constant Bitrate, Constant Quality (1–31 quantiser), Constraint Quality | Quality Preset and Constant Quality only (2–31 quantiser) — the bitrate and file-size modes disappear |
| Motion handling | Blocking and smearing on fast movement, typical of H.263-class codecs | No motion artefacts, because there is no motion prediction |
| Sensible for | Anything where size matters, which is most cases | Frame-accurate review material, or a legacy tool that specifically wants MJPEG |
Note that the Constant Quality control is labelled "CRF" but is really an MPEG quantiser scale where 1 or 2 is the best quality and 31 the worst — the reverse of the direction a CRF number implies on an H.264 page. There is no Variable Bitrate entry with FLV selected, which is correct: the encoder does not support it. If you do pick MJPEG, use Constant Quality rather than the Quality Preset — the MJPEG encoder is driven by that qscale value directly.
Recorded Television Does Not Flatter Flash
DVR-MS holds standard-definition broadcast, and two of its characteristics survive the conversion in ways that look like converter faults but are not.
Interlacing stays. SD broadcast stores two time-offset fields per frame, and there is no de-interlacing step anywhere in this pipeline. Sorenson Spark was never designed for interlaced material, so combing shows up as a shimmering horizontal texture on movement — worse in the SWF than it looked on the original recording. De-interlace before uploading if this matters.
Non-square pixels stay too. A 720 x 480 or 720 x 576 broadcast frame is meant to be stretched to 4:3 or 16:9 on display, and nothing here performs pixel-aspect correction. Set Video resolution to Width x Height and type the display dimensions — 640 x 480 for 4:3 NTSC, 768 x 576 for 4:3 PAL — rather than resizing by percentage, which will preserve the wrong shape.
Where a SWF Actually Plays Now
| Player | Works with a video SWF? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari | No | The plug-in interface Flash used was removed from all of them after Adobe's end-of-life date |
| Standalone Flash Player projector | Yes | A desktop application that opens .swf directly, with no browser or plug-in involved |
| VLC and other ffmpeg-based players | Yes | They demux the SWF and decode the video stream directly |
| Ruffle emulator | Unreliable for video | Ruffle targets Flash animations and ActionScript content; a file built mainly to carry a video stream is not what it does best |
| Flash preservation launchers | Case by case | Built around games and interactive content rather than video playback |
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I be converting recorded TV to SWF at all?
Only if something specific demands the container. Flash reached end of life on 31 December 2020 and was blocked from running on 12 January 2021, so a SWF made today has no browser to play it in. The conversion also costs quality twice over — MPEG-2 broadcast is already lossy, and re-encoding into Sorenson Spark loses more. DVR to MP4 gives you H.264, which plays everywhere and looks better at any given file size.
My recording will not convert. Is that a bug?
Usually not. Many Media Center recordings from premium channels were flagged copy-protected when they were made, and Microsoft's design binds such a file to the machine that recorded it — no converter, online or installed, can decode it. The other frequent cause is a file that is really a .wtv or a proprietary security-DVR container wearing a .dvr name. WTV replaced DVR-MS from the Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 onwards, so a recording made on a later system is likely to be that instead.
Why does the Audio Codec dropdown only offer MP3?
Because the SWF muxer accepts nothing else. That also means your recording's MPEG-1 Layer II or Dolby Digital soundtrack is decoded and re-encoded to MP3, and a multichannel mix is downmixed rather than preserved. If the surround mix matters, SWF is the wrong destination — keep the original recording or convert to a container that carries multichannel audio.
Why did the sample rate of my audio change?
Because SWF supports only 44,100, 22,050 and 11,025 Hz, and the pipeline sets 44,100 for every SWF output. Broadcast audio is normally 48 kHz, so it is resampled on the way in; there is no control for this on the page and the muxer will not accept 48 kHz regardless. The audible effect is negligible, but if you are checking sample rates downstream, that is why the number changed.
Will the SWF be smaller than the original recording?
Almost certainly yes, and by a lot. DVR-MS holds broadcast MPEG-2 at several megabits per second, and an hour of it is typically a couple of gigabytes. Sorenson Spark at a moderate Quality Preset, especially if you also drop the resolution, produces something far smaller. If you need a specific target, use Specific file size and give it a byte figure — but be aware that squeezing an H.263-class codec hard produces very visible blocking.
Can I convert only one segment of a long recording?
Yes. Set Trim to Time Range and enter a Start time and a Duration; both accept plain seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss. That is worth doing on recorded television, because a whole programme in a dated codec is a poor use of both upload time and quality. Video Cutter also accepts .dvr directly if you would rather cut before converting.
Does the SWF keep the programme guide information from the recording?
No. DVR-MS carries the title, channel, description and broadcast time in metadata streams, and SWF has nowhere to store any of that, so it is discarded. Note anything you need from the recording's properties before you convert.
Can I open the resulting SWF in Adobe Animate and edit it?
Not as a project. A .swf is a published, compiled file, not the editable .fla that produced it. Animate can import a SWF, but you do not get back a timeline, layers or scripts — and a SWF that exists purely to carry a re-encoded video stream has nothing meaningful to edit anyway. Treat it as a delivery file.
What is the difference between the file I get here and an FLV?
Container, mostly. An .flv is Flash's dedicated video container; a .swf is the general Flash movie format that can hold animation, vector graphics, scripts and embedded video. Both end up carrying Sorenson Spark video with MP3 audio in this workflow. If your legacy tool actually wants a video file rather than a Flash movie, DVR to FLV is likely the closer match.
What happens to my recording after the conversion?
It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours, along with the SWF it produced. There is no sign-up, no watermark and files are never shared or made public. Recorded television files are large, so upload time on your connection is what determines how long the job takes.