File Conversion is something every computer user would certainly go through one time or the other, especially dealing with media files and documents. We largely depend on software or web services to do this, and since the formats are many, the tools/services which convert to those formats are many. I have been playing with a free file converter software called File Blender, for the last two days and am pretty impressed with it and its file conversion features.
File Blender file formats converter software
File Blender is a Video Converter, Image Converter, Audio Converter, PDF/TIFF Splitter and Joiner software. The great thing about File Blender is it supports conversion between almost all multimedia files including picture and video formats like – FLV, MP3, M4A, ACC, MPG, MPEG, VOB, WMV, MP4, GIF, BMP, ICO, JPG, JPEG, TIFF, WMF, etc.
This tool isn’t stand-alone software on its own, but it’s like a compact extensible command-line wrapper encapsulating various command-line conversion tools under a single package. Let me explain in detail.
1. It is compact
File Blender works right according to the purpose. Right after I downloaded the compressed file, extracted it and ran it for the first time(the process is pretty easy), I was a bit astonished because what I saw is this –
That’s it. No fancy colors, unnecessary buttons, and shiny graphics or anything. All you need to do is drop or select file(s) and depending on the format your file belongs to, File Blender will displays options according to that. Below is an example when I used a jpg image.
Irrespective of the format, it supports encrypting/decrypting of the content with the help of a password which is very helpful if you want to protect your data.
2. It is a command-line wrapper
For those who don’t know, command-line tools work from the command line (CMD on Windows or Shell in Linux, for example), without having any graphical interface components. They are very useful for developers to test, whether the desired functionality of the software is working correctly or not, as a prototype. They also use less memory and no long installation headaches. All the actions we usually perform by pressing buttons like browsing files, etc, are done by typing commands only. But you don’t need to do all that in here as File Blender does that work for you. It is a command-line wrapper, in the sense that it combines some free conversion command-line tools, and makes them work just by clicking buttons on the interface, with the help of batch files that run in the background. Eventually, this tool turns out to be faster and simpler.
3. It is extendable
As I mentioned before, this tool wraps other command-line tools under one roof. Not only that, it allows us to customize. This means that, if you happen to know a tool that converts formats that aren’t supported by File Blender already, you can include that inside this tool and work with it.
For instance, File Blender doesn’t support conversions between DOC, PDF, etc. But if you happen to know a command-line tool Doc PDF Converter which does that, you can make some changes and include that as well. Since it has a lot of scope for future development, we can expect more options and improvements to this tool in the future.
How File Blender works
When you convert a file(s) using File Blender, the output will get saved in a folder called Out on your desktop. Each file format will support different options, along with Encryption. For instance the Split and Join operation is available for PDF format only.
The working mechanism behind File Blender
File Blender contains its core inside the “Actions” folder. You can right-click/press F1 to navigate to that folder. In that folder, you will see subfolders belonging to different formats. If you want to add new functionality to the tool, you need to create a new folder that defines what it has to do. At the same time, if you want to delete functionality, you simply have to delete a folder. Every sub-folder contains below-shown components.
- Configuration Setting File – This is like a batch file with .b extension containing some code and will run when triggered by File Blender
- Exe folder – This contains command-line tools and plugins using which the actual operations are performed.
When you select or drop a file with a specific format, File Blender will scan for configuration settings file which accepts that format and runs that code. So, all the options you see like converting, inverting, encryption, etc. are defined inside that file, and run with the help of command-line arguments, passed to the executable file present in the Exe folder. If you are familiar with coding, you can modify it to make it work as you want.
You can download File Blender from here.
TIP: File Converter is another free file converter software that you would like to check out.
