Topic: Warning: use mencoder, not swftools.org's GIF2SWF

I just had a bad experience with the swftools.org app "gif2swf".  It converts a GIF to a SWF file and it supports animated GIFs.  However, for those, it does a very naive algorithm where it just outputs all the frames into their own bitmaps then plays those as a sequence.  When I did that for the GIF that's the basis of "Creepy Eye" (http://chumby.com/guide/0419B65D-B040-3 … CAE/widget), I saw orange screens, and watching the console showed it was an out-of-memory situation.

I had a much better experience with using mencoder to convert directly from the GIF to a SWF.  It took some searching to find a useful command line recipie, but once I did, it worked the first time and the SWF was 1/8th the size of the original version.  It also played back much better on device, with no out-of-memory pauses or glitches.

For reference, here's what I used:

mencoder test.gif -lavfopts format=swf -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv -o test.swf