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Shockwave vs. Flash: a clarification

Shockwave vs. Flash: a clarification

CNET staff
Scott Maier offers this clarification regarding our recent coverage of problems with playing Shockwave animations in Explorer 5.1.1:

    "Flash movies, made with Macromedia Flash, have to be 'shocked' before they are playable on the web. This process turns them from uncompressed .fla files used for authoring into compressed .swf files that are viewable with either the Flash Player or plugin (or QuickTime, for that matter). These movies are sometimes referred to as 'Shockwave Flash' and indeed that is how the plugin is named. It is stated that IE 5.1.1 comes with support for Flash and Shockwave. 'Shockwave' by itself, refers to compressed movies output using Director. They require a completely different plugin to play back. Even though they say that IE comes with this, it does not.

    My concern is that it is not appropriate to refer to Flash movies as Shockwave movies, because they are not. Macromedia is to blame for this, as years ago they started labeling Flash movies as 'Shockwave Flash' after Shockwave itself had already existed for some time. It's better to call Flash movies Flash (.fla, .swf), and call Shockwave movies (.dir, .dcr, .dxr) Shockwave. There is currently no way to play Shockwave content on OS X as far as I can tell (other than Classic)."