How to play Flash SWF on PC and Mac?

As announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020. Adobe will not issue Flash Player updates or security patches after that. Web browsers are dropping support for Flash. Most media players also discontinue the support for flash videos, especially those in .swf format. If you have saved flash SWF files on your local computer, how can you play these Flash SWf files on your local PC or Mac? In this article, we recommend two flash player alternatives which you can use to play Flash videos on your local machine with or without web browsers.

Flash Player

Use the debugger & standalone versions of Flash Player

Visit the debug player or content debuggers page https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html. Scroll down on the Debug Downloads page to find and download the “Download the Flash Player projector content debugger” under Windows, Mac, or Linux section, depending on which operating system you’re using.

If you are using a Windows PC, you will download an EXE file which you can double click to run instantly. As we mentioned above it is the debugger and standalone versions of Flash Player. No installation required.

Drag and drop an SWF file to the Adobe Flash Player window to open it or click File > Open, then browse to an SWF file on your PC or Mac. You can even use this debug version to play SWF files on the web. Click File > Open, just copy the URL link to the Flash file and paste it to the Location box, press OK button to play Flash video on the internet.

Play Flash with Flash Player emulators

There are also online Flash players or emulators you can use to play Flash files from local computer. ruffle is one of them. It is a Flash Player emulator built in the Rust programming language. Open https://ruffle.rs/demo/, click Choose File button from the top, browse to your local PC or Mac to find and upload the flash file, then click big play button in the middle of this page to play the Flash swf file.