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<p>Dear Paul,</p>
<p>Thanks very much. I expect Claude Code and other LLM's will
profit from the article you reference on the structure of Director
dir files. </p>
<p>I wonder what sort of response we could get from Adobe on these
matters? Are they hanging on to all the code like Smaug in his
lair? What is the state of all that? Would they work with us or
give us the code and documentation or something?</p>
<p>I just started using AI in VSCode (Copilot). So I'm a real newbie
at using AI in my programming practice. But people seem to be
blown away by Claude Code and its capabilities, especially Opus
4.5. So I will probably get a $20/month subscription to that soon
and see what I can see. </p>
<p>All of us have put in a lot of our vital lives to creating
Director stuff. I know I have. </p>
<p>ja</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2026-01-25 7:31 a.m., Paul Catanese
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAGhDJCr4K=uL5V9x1GiUH5DFrYpzhTgdX6J2Q2XCcLjYTTde7w@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">Dear Jim-
<div>Just wanted to pipe up that I'm fascinated and very
interested in this direction; it would be great if it could
bear fruit. I don't have time to focus on this deeplyy, but I
am cheering you on, and wanted you to know it, and wanted to
share some thoughts. The idea that an old director project
could be translated to html5 seems like a great dream. Would
love to see it.</div>
<div>
<div>I was not aware of the projectorrays project - this
certainly could be of interest.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<div>I was also fascinated about Danny's comment about .dir's
being.zip's - I didn't know that, but I had effectively
shifted away from Director by around 2006.</div>
<div>Googling a bit, I did come across this post that speaks to
the internal structure as an RIFX container. </div>
<div><a
href="https://nosamu.medium.com/a-tour-of-the-adobe-director-file-format-e375d1e063c0"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://nosamu.medium.com/a-tour-of-the-adobe-director-file-format-e375d1e063c0</a></div>
<div>This direction is a bit lower-level than I'd want to get
mixed up in, but could be useful in thinking about what needs
to be extracted.</div>
<div>There's a few references at the bottom of the document
that may also be of interest, including the projectorrays
project.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Please forgive some preaching to the choir, but wanted to
jot down some general thoughts:</div>
<div>* Recalling that some projects used 1-frame loops
w/parent-child scripts, some used "timeline only", and
majority used a hybrid approach e.g. approaches where
instances carried behavioral scripts - I would suspect that
these different authored-project architectures might require
differing translation approaches for HTML5. </div>
<div>
<div>
<div>* Large multi .dir projects would likely derive back
down to one of those cases. </div>
</div>
<div>* Functionalities provided by 3rd party xtras seem like
another area of particular wrinkles to be unwound, as would
some internal xtras like quicktime.</div>
</div>
<div>* webgl should certainly be robust enough to handle
shockwave 3d scenegraph & related functionalities </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div><b>emulation?</b></div>
<div>In the net.art context, I had spoken with the Rhizome
folks years ago, and their approach to preserving (flash)
works was the emulation as a service model. They also did
some interesting preservation techniques for director
CD-Rom's in which old hardware would run projects natively,
and then results streamed to clients - but the costs were
personally way out of reach. I'm not even clear if they are
still involved in anything like that. The approach you're
talking about is a refreshing new angle for director works.
That said, I did start to wonder what it would mean to have
a software emulator, perhaps even a browser-based emulator
that could run director projects, rather than converting
them. </div>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><b>Bigger picture still</b></div>
<div>Jon Ippollito & Richard Rinehart's book: Re-Collection
offers another thought - that new media art projects might be
better considered as notation based (e.g. like music or
theatrical productions) - so that recreating media artworks
with new tools is part of their nature. I was at the WRO art
center in Poland a few weeks ago, and they had recreated
pieces like Camille Utterback's "text rain", as well as an
early Paul Sharits piece, and a rutt-etra style video
rasterization demo, among others, that fit into this framework
- <a href="https://wrocenter.pl/pl/mi/"
moz-do-not-send="true">check them out here</a>. The guy who
did the heavy lifting: Pawel Janicki might be interested in
your project. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>-paul</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at
7:46\u202fPM Jim Andrews <<a href="mailto:jim@vispo.com"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jim@vispo.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>Hi Danny,</p>
<p>I expect you already know about ProjectorRays: <a
href="https://github.com/ProjectorRays/ProjectorRays"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://github.com/ProjectorRays/ProjectorRays</a>
. It isn't fantastic but it's something.</p>
<p>This friend of mine I mentioned says "I never used
copilot. I am in the IntelliJ ecosystem - WebStorm. They
have in there "junie" coding agent, which as far as i know
built on top of Claude model."</p>
<p>People are raving about Claude Code. Anyway, my friend
seems to think that this sort of AI could well convert
something like .dir files to HTML5. I'm not sure he
appreciates the difficulty of the problem--though he is a
pro programmer. Maybe he does. </p>
<p>Anyway, I suspect that if we could get some specs and
whatnot on Director, that would help in the process.</p>
<p>All of us spent eons creating work with Director. Anyone
else interested or have info to share on this question??</p>
<p>ja</p>
<div>On 2026-01-24 3:27 p.m., Danny Kodicek wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Adobe / Macromedia always insisted there
was no way to decompile .dcrs (although that always
sounded unlikely to me). But IIRC .dirs were like .docs
- just zip files with a different name. Theoretically I
think you should be able to rename them to .zip and open
them up. That might only be true for later editions of
Director, though - and it might not be true at all!
Maybe I'm just making it up...</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 24 Jan 2026 at
21:50, Jim Andrews <<a href="mailto:jim@vispo.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">jim@vispo.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hello
dear Hopper folks,<br>
<br>
I have a question and issue to raise with you about
conversion of <br>
Director stuff to HTML5 (or other formats).<br>
<br>
I am a newbie at using AI in my programming
practice--just started the <br>
day before yesterday with Copilot in VSCode. So far so
good.<br>
<br>
But a friend of mine is intent upon using more
powerful AI tools to <br>
convert the Arteroids (<a
href="https://arteroids.vispo.com" rel="noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://arteroids.vispo.com</a>)
source code .dir <br>
into html5.<br>
<br>
Not surprisingly, the thing he's having problems with
is the dir format. <br>
There is a published format for SWF, and there's a
decompiler for <br>
Director, but I guess AIs are going to have big
problems trying to <br>
'translate' dir or dcr files.<br>
<br>
Has anyone approached Adobe about making some (at
least) documentation <br>
about Director public so we can try to salvage and
convert the IMMENSE <br>
work many of us did in creating Director work?<br>
<br>
And what is out there now, if anything at all?<br>
<br>
ja<br>
<a href="https://vispo.com" rel="noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://vispo.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
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