How to read text from a flash movie (.swf)

Question

Today I realized that Google is indexing the text from flash movies and it's quite interesting to me how this can be achieved with any server-side language (PHP) for example ? Since it's a compiled file the only possible way that I tough it's by Optical Character Recognition.

Edit: This is an example with all the flash movies that have been indexed for a Bulgarian flash website.

Answer 1

This is something that you might want to read: SWF Searchability.

Particularly, there is a paragraph that might be the key to the question you asked:

Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs a SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user.

So, it seems they provided a specific flash player to those two search engines in order to make their content crawlable and that is why you can search by text that appear in the movie. However, I am not really sure how you would do this with any server side language.