[Hopperxx] converting .dir and/or .dcr to HTML5 and/or other languages
Jim Andrews
jim at vispo.com
Sun Jan 25 11:53:13 CST 2026
Dear Paul,
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.
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?
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.
All of us have put in a lot of our vital lives to creating Director
stuff. I know I have.
ja
On 2026-01-25 7:31 a.m., Paul Catanese wrote:
> Dear Jim-
> 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.
> I was not aware of the projectorrays project - this certainly could be
> of interest.
>
> 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.
> Googling a bit, I did come across this post that speaks to the
> internal structure as an RIFX container.
> https://nosamu.medium.com/a-tour-of-the-adobe-director-file-format-e375d1e063c0
> 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.
> There's a few references at the bottom of the document that may also
> be of interest, including the projectorrays project.
>
> Please forgive some preaching to the choir, but wanted to jot down
> some general thoughts:
> * 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.
> * Large multi .dir projects would likely derive back down to one of
> those cases.
> * Functionalities provided by 3rd party xtras seem like another area
> of particular wrinkles to be unwound, as would some internal xtras
> like quicktime.
> * webgl should certainly be robust enough to handle shockwave 3d
> scenegraph & related functionalities
>
> *emulation?*
> 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.
>
> *Bigger picture still*
> 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 - check them out here
> <https://wrocenter.pl/pl/mi/>. The guy who did the heavy lifting:
> Pawel Janicki might be interested in your project.
>
> -paul
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at 7:46 PM Jim Andrews <jim at vispo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Danny,
>
> I expect you already know about ProjectorRays:
> https://github.com/ProjectorRays/ProjectorRays . It isn't
> fantastic but it's something.
>
> 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."
>
> 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.
>
> Anyway, I suspect that if we could get some specs and whatnot on
> Director, that would help in the process.
>
> All of us spent eons creating work with Director. Anyone else
> interested or have info to share on this question??
>
> ja
>
> On 2026-01-24 3:27 p.m., Danny Kodicek wrote:
>> 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...
>>
>> On Sat, 24 Jan 2026 at 21:50, Jim Andrews <jim at vispo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello dear Hopper folks,
>>
>> I have a question and issue to raise with you about
>> conversion of
>> Director stuff to HTML5 (or other formats).
>>
>> I am a newbie at using AI in my programming practice--just
>> started the
>> day before yesterday with Copilot in VSCode. So far so good.
>>
>> But a friend of mine is intent upon using more powerful AI
>> tools to
>> convert the Arteroids (https://arteroids.vispo.com) source
>> code .dir
>> into html5.
>>
>> Not surprisingly, the thing he's having problems with is the
>> dir format.
>> There is a published format for SWF, and there's a decompiler
>> for
>> Director, but I guess AIs are going to have big problems
>> trying to
>> 'translate' dir or dcr files.
>>
>> Has anyone approached Adobe about making some (at least)
>> documentation
>> about Director public so we can try to salvage and convert
>> the IMMENSE
>> work many of us did in creating Director work?
>>
>> And what is out there now, if anything at all?
>>
>> ja
>> https://vispo.com
>>
>>
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