How to Make Flash (.swf) Transparent?

There are two ways to make flash file transparent, one is to export as a transparent file when you are publishing from Macromedia Flash and another to insert a line of code in the HTML. We will cover both ways in this tutorial.

Browsers that support flash transparency:

Internet Explorer 3 or higher (Windows)
Internet Explorer 5.1* and 5.2* (Macintosh)
Netscape 7.0*
Mozilla 1.0 or higher*
AOL*
CompuServe*

* Macromedia Flash Player version 6,0,65,0 (Windows) or 6,0,67,0 (Macintosh) or higher required for this feature.

1. First let's look at the first one, publishing flash file (.swf) as a transparent file. Open a new file in your Macromedia Flash and draw circle in the middle with any color. Now save your file and go to File > Publish Settings or press Ctrl+Shift+F12. You should see the following window. In this window go to HTML tab and select Transparent Windowless from Window Mode. And press Publish.

Now your file is saved as a transparent swf. To be able to check the transparency of your file go and change the background color of your page (which was generated by Flash) from white to some other color. If you have followed correctly you should see only your circle on your background color, without the white rectangle around it.

2. Let's see the second way of making flash transparent. Rarely you will use the Flash generated page in your homepages, most of the time you will be inserting a flash file into your existing page. This second way of making flash file transparent is suitable for the latter.

Open your page that you would like to insert flash file with Dreamweaver or with any other HTML Editor and insert a flash file inside it. Click on the flash file and go to the code view mode.

You would see a code similar to the following:

What you have to do now is to insert a line of code inside this code, telling that this flash should be transparent. Here is the revised code. New code is shown in bold.

Just insert this line of code in green color after the last <param name="... code and add to wmode="transparent" the <embed src="... And you should have a transparent flash file!