File identification software
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Software | > | File identification software |
Software that automates the process of Identifying Files.
- Apache Tika (cross-platform, open source, website): "The Apache Tika™ toolkit detects and extracts metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries." Written in Java.
- DROID (cross-platform, open source, website): "DROID is a software tool developed by The National Archives [of the United Kingdom] to perform automated batch identification of file formats." Requires Java 6, will not run on Java 7 as of 28 Oct 2012.
- FIDO (cross-platform, open source, website: Format Identification for Digital Objects, written in Python.
- File command (various implementations): a standard Unix command, found on almost all Unix and Unix-like (i.e., Linux) systems. See the Debian man page for an overview.
- FI Tools (Windows, commercial, website)
- G-Spot (Windows, freeware, website): Identifies audio and video codecs need to play a media file.
- MediaInfo (cross-platform, open source, website): "MediaInfo is a convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files."
- TrID (Windows/Linux, free for non-commercial use, website): identifies files using a database of filetype signatures. Also has an online version.