Adobe Flash SWF Poor Quality Scaling

Question

I have a flash swf animation that is rendered in 800x600 resolution. Because of all of the junk in browser toolbars, I'm finding that a lot of people with 1024x768 screen resolution are not able to fit the entire video into their browser viewing area. I'd like to scale the animation down to 720x540. However, whenever I use the built-in scaling mechanisms for flash, the video becomes very jagged and ugly.

If I convert the swf to a quicktime video, it scales down very smoothly. However, the size of the video goes up pretty dramatically.

Is there a way to get a flash animation to scale down smoothly? I'm fine with using third-party tools and/or making a new swf. However, I'd like to use the swf format if possible.

Answer 1

You can us the smoothing property of the video element to make it scale more smoothly:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/media/Video.html#smoothing

Answer 2

Most content created in Flash is vector, so unless you were rendering raster content insider your flash video (i.e. images/video from the outside), it should look fine if you just embed it in your page at a different size. As in, don't bother trying to resize it inside the .flv file, simply set the height and width of the embedded .swf using CSS on your page and I would image in it should scale fine. (it should scale upwards or downards fine). That's the beauty of vector.