Rendering flash SWF to Video in linux

Recently we came across the need of rendering a flash animation into video directly using linux.
We started doing some searching but nothing stood out as an easy solution. There were, though, a lot of links on how to convert FLV to another video formats (which is a totally different issue).

Then we started to look into the linux open source flash players, and it turns out that Gnash has an experimental feature that allows you to render the animation (including sound) to video and audio files.

Here is explained how to compile Gnash for doing this and how to use some other tools for having an usable video.

This seems to work flawlessly if you don't mind using a hell of disk space since Gnash renders the video as a sequence of uncompressed video frames. Of course we only tried a couple of animations so you may run into some troubles as this feature is supposed to be a bit experimental.

As I said before, this should not be advisable for converting FLV to another video formats (nor to convert animations that use online videos or the like, I guess). There are a lot of easier alternatives to do that (such as ffmpeg).

Hope this helps!