How can I get useful information from flash swf files?
It might help to look at the arguments passed to the Flash movie.  If there's reference to an FLV file then there's a good chance the SWF is being used to play a movie.
The path to the SWF might help too.  If it's under, say an /ads directory then it's probably just a banner ad.  Or if it's under /games then it's probably a game.
Other than using heuristics like this there's probably not much you can do.  SWFs can be used for a lot of different things, and there's really nothing in the SWF itself that would tell you what "type" it is.
I'm doing some crawling with Python, and would like to be able to identify (however imperfectly) the flash I come across - is it a video, an ad, a game, or whatever.
I assume I would have to decompile the swf, which seems doable. But what sort of processing would I do with the decompiled Actionscript to figure out what it's purpose is?
Edit: or any better ideas would be most welcome also.