How do I extract Flash content from a PDF file?

Question

I have a PDF file that has a flash file embedded.

How can I can extract that SWF from inside the PDF file?

Update:

I am using Windows 7.

Solution 1

Found a product that can do it: PDFTron's PDF CosEdit can extract the resources. I opened the a PDF with embedded Rich Media videos in CosEdit, then scrolled to the bottom (where the files with the largest Offset values were kept). For me, these were it. I extracted the resources, and they opened as MP4s. You might want to try MP4, SWF, etc. or inspect the resource's headers to help identify its type.

For a programmatic solution, they have other software as well, and they published this article which appears useful.

Solution 2

If you are using OS X, you can try FileJuicer

If you are using Windows or Linux you can try SWFTools (specifically the SWFExtract app)

Comments

[psusi]

What?! A pdf can not have flash content embedded.

[Karan]

SWFExtract "Allows to extract Movieclips, Sounds, Images etc. from SWF files."

[Arjan]

What's your affiliation with that product?

[Travis Bennett]

No affiliation with them, just took me forever to find it. Tried to install Origami PDF on Linux to do it, but it was complicated by PVM.

[Travis Bennett]

Just took me forever to find something, so when I found it I thought I would share it.

[Arjan]

Ok, sorry for being a pain; we just get so much astroturfing here. I've meanwhile found your profile picture at LinkedIn too, so I'm quite sure you're NOT working at PDFTron. Thanks for sharing!

[George]

This worked great, thank you so much! In my case I found the files by finding streams that had a Subtype "audio/mpeg". I also changed my stream viewer in "Customize..." to VLC so I could verify that I could open these files and that they were those I was looking for. Then I just had to save them with Save Stream Data to File.