High-Efficiency SWF Compression Support
Previous versions of Flash Player have been able to interpret .swf files which use the zlib compression mechanism. With Flash Player 11, LZMA can also be used to compress a .swf for deployment. The need for an additional compression mechanism came about as Stage3D content and textures actually benefit greatly from this manner of compression. In order to be mindful of file size and user bandwidth, Adobe engineers decided to adopt this additional compression mechanism in the new Flash Player.
Note
Keep in mind that even though ActionScript and vector content can be highly compressed with LZMA, the compression of bitmap content will be very similar to that seen with zlib.
The main benefit of LZMA compression is that it is possible to crunch content down to up to 40% of the original size depending upon the content being compressed.
Note
It is important to note that there is not yet tooling support for this new compression mechanism at the time of this writing. If a developer wants to take advantage of this new mechanism, it can be done through other utilities but would require knowledge of something like Python or C++ to get going. For more information on this subject, see Tinic Uro’s excellent post at http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=124.
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