Macromedia Flash 8 Unexpected File Format

[Hollis Abdelkarim]

Im using Macromedia Flash 8 and whenever I try to open a .fla file with resources I need it says "unexpected file format" I've searched for answers but haven't found anything that worked. Please help

I am in desperate need of someone's help. For the second time I cannot open 2 FLAs that I have more than 100 design hours invested. I'm running CS5 and need to find out what can be done? I am afraid to do anything with the fear this will happen again, I have got to open these files and finish the projects. How can this be done or what can resolve the issue.

As with the last bullet point, and the title of this post, the "Unexpected File Format" error has been the last straw. This camel's back is broken. Just now I heightened my Adobe experience by failing to install CS5 on Vista because of "Error with Component Dependencies" -- but only after clicking 20 or 30 times to actually download the Akamai download manager -- whatever.

As technical lead at our company, I have now begun strongly advising against production of any serious work when the requirement involves working with what, in my opinion, is now this demo-only "show your friends" piece of software -- Flash CS5.

I purchased CS5 for Windows 7 and started working on a site that was built in CS4. When I saved it the first time, it gave me the option to save it in CS4 or CS5 format. I saved two copies, one in each format. Every time I've saved my progress, I've done the same thing. Saving multiple copies of a .fla file is helpful under any other circumstance, but it's useless in this one because Flash suddenly decided it didn't feel like opening any of them today.

I tried opening the same file I've been working on for days and it said "Unexpected file format. Can't find file: [file name]." It opened everything with no problems yesterday and every previous day, but today it gave me this message. It seems like a lot of other people have been having this issue and I really hope someone can offer some advice.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Flash tech support only to have them tell me that it was a file issue and had nothing to do with the program. I created a new .fla document, saved it, and it re-opened fine. Their only explanation was that "your files have been corrupted and the program is working perfectly fine, sorry," with no explanation as to WHY they were suddenly being rejected by Flash.

I myself have never had this type of problem with my own files for years ... The only time it happened to me was when I handled a file of my client, which simply may have been poorly treated. This is one in thousands if not more error ...

Guess what. I just randomly stumbled upon this thread when my gf was experiencing problems with a .fla file created in Adobe Flash CS 5, on a Windows 7 64bit machine, which for no apparent reason started throwing the "Unexpected file format" error.

So... I renamed the file to [filename].zip, opened it in winrar and pressed ALT + R (tools -> Repair archive) after the winrar process had thrown an "Unexpected end of archive" error.

Hey Wertisdk1! I tried your ways with my particular corrupt fla. It didn't really worked, but it gave me a good idea, which in the end led me to recovering at least half of my "lost" work. 2 Days of hard frame by frame animation was in risk! Thanks!

So here's what I did, perhaps it can help some one. Took me a few tests and tries but in the end it was good. You can recover your lost SYMBOLS. Its a way of getting back all your project library into a new flash file. It goes like this:

3) Once 'decompressed', I opened the LIBRARY folder (eg: c:\documentscorrupted\LIBRARY\), in which all the symbols in my corrupted project are apparently stored as xml's. I backuped this files for later. This are my original symbols I want to be restored.

4) In Flash CS5, I started a new project, exactly the same size and specs of the corrupted one. Create a symbol in it and name it with some name you can remember, like recovery. Just any symbol, a graphic or a movie clip, whatever.

6) I go and open this new 'correputed_file_NEW.fla' using again WINRAR and once again uncompress the whole fla into a new folder. eg: c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\

7) Go to that folder and open DOMDocument.XML using notepad, dreamweaver or whatever text reader you have. You'll see a long HTML code. Focus on the 7th or 8th line, you'll see and then a list of the symbols in your fla, which in this case would only be that "recovery" we just created.

10) Goto the folder c:\documents\corrupted_file_NEW\, select all this files and folders and "compile" them again using Winrar. This is done by selecting them all, right click and "add to archive..." OR straight from Winrar, look for the files, highlight them and click on 'ADD'.

In my case, I recovered all the symbols in which layed a lot of the work I almost lost during the file corruption! I still have to start overall the timeline work, but when everything seemed lost, this helped me a lot!

Having a corrupt fla is a pretty horrible thing to have. Specially when you obviously didn't made a backup of the file, obviously! And see with horror hours, days or weeks of work just die... or worse! Stay in coma!

First, copy your corrupted FLA into a new folder. Rename your FLA to [Your File].zip. Then Open that ZIP File with WinRAR and press Alt + R to repair the Archive. Extract the content of the fixed new ZIP file into another folder.

Now, open the "DOMDocument.xml" in Safari. In my case, Safari throws a XML Error. I opened that XML with an Editor and found a non UTF-8 Char at the Line where Safari throwed the error. I deleted that Char, saved the XML and opened the XFL File. Everything works fine.

Where did that non UTF-8 Char came from? In my case, i copied same Text from Powerpoint into a component property field. And everybody should know, that copied text from MS Products comes with a lot of garbage, that nobody needs. Flash saves your texts with that garbage in a xml and your FLA is coruppted.

I created my fla file yesterday - it's a simple drawing, was working on it today tried to save it and it wouldn't save - I tried saving to a different place - still wouldn't save. I closed it down and tried to reopen and have not been able to open ever since (I get the 'Unexpected File Format' error). I restarted my machine - installed the CS5 update, tried the zip repair solution.

Hello Everyone. This is a very common problem with Flash Professional, even in the fully updated CS6. For starters use version control or create a second copy of your FLA using 'save as.' That is not a fix but a future measure for you to employ.

As for your question, I hope you tested the FLA. If you did, you will have a SWF file in the folder of your FLA. It may also show up as an HTML file when you look at it. Anyway, download SoThink decompiler from here:

Decomplile the SWF in a new folder and retrieve your FLA. Sothink will give you a very ugly FLA with like 40 frame layers (even if you only had three). JPEXS will retrieve your actionscript (except for timeline code which, I am sorry to say, may be lost forever).

I hope this will make it easier for you to recover your work and get back on track. I also had to learn this the hard way when I ran into the ubiquitous "Unexpected file format" error. I hope Adobe will fix this.

1. Open WinRAR

2. Select the *.fla file and click the "Repair" button and choose to treat the archive as a .zip file

3. WinRAR created rebuilt.*.fla file. Open it.

4. The file seems to work now, but generating swf may not work. From here you can just copy/paste the clips and code to new, empty document.

Yes we are using this software in a network environment and are saving to a network location. However we have started to save to memory pens which also seem to fall to this bug or design fault within Flash.

Is adobe going to look at making flash and other products more suitable working in a network environment? As you can imagine we are training our students to use your software now so that when they leave they are adapt and confident to continue using your software!

Trying to scan to USB stick using a stick I've used successfully many thimes before. Today the printer tells me it's using an unsupported file system and I need to reformat it using a FAT file system. Any help on how to sort this outwould be appreciated.

HP Printers typically requires USB flash drives with FAT32 file system. Backing up the existing data from the flash driver and then formatting the flash drive with FAT32 file system should resolve the issue. I believe we can use Disk Utility to format USB flash drive to FAT32.

If the information I've provided was helpful, give us some reinforcement by clicking the Accepted Solution and Kudos buttons, that'll help us and others see that we've got the answers!

Have a great day!

OTOH, unexpected end of file can sometimes mean a formatting issue with the script. Did you make the script, or copy/paste it from somewhere online? If you did the latter, what application did you copy it into? Some text editors, most notably TextEdit, are notorious for adding all kinds of rich text formatting into text files, which will mess up a shell script.

Ok, I had to look that script over several times, but I'm wondering about something. Since I don't have any type of Symantec tools installed, I have no way of checking this, but, is the "Endpoint Agent" in that path just a folder? Or is it an app? If it's an app, then the .app extension is missing from the path line. Also, I noticed that Info,plist is written as info.plist (note the lowercase "i" instead of uppercase) Unless Symantec is breaking a very standardized rule of Info.plists and using a lower case info, which I doubt is the case, then I'm wondering it that needs to be changed to:

Yeah, the filename is capitalized, but that's not responsible for the unexpected end of file error; if case sensitivity were the issue, it would produce a file not found error when I run just the defaults read "/Library/Manufacturer/Endpoint Agent/Resources/info.plist" CFBundleShortVersionString command by itself; this command runs just fine as it is. I'm actually thinking of just hand-typing or even rewriting this script in a *nix editor just to ensure there aren't any hidden ^M's I'm not expecting that aren't showing up in my other editors....

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