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| format factory software |
Converts between FLV, AVI, MP4, WMV, MPG and other video formats, WAV, MP3, WMA, M4A, OGG and other music formats or JPEG, PNG, ICO, BMP, TIFF and other image formats. Rips the content from DVDs as well as CDs and supports watermarking.
The increasing amount of file formats available, together with the different nature of the various devices that we use at home and at work, make a tool like FormatFactory nearly a must on our desktop. This free multi-format utility comes with tools and codecs to help you convert, edit, and enhance document files, images, video, and audio files – concatenate as many of these conversions tasks as you wish and then launch them all in just one go.
As it happens with many of these multi-format, multi-purpose, all-in-one software programs, the interface has its lights and shadows. Putting together editing tools and multiple formats for various file types plus a set of extra tools is never easy, and usually the results are mixed, at best. Actually, the GUI itself is fairly simple once you know how the program works – tabs on the left-hand side for each file type and a panel on the right-hand side to pile up all the tasks we want to perform (an excellent time-saving idea when performing multiple conversions and an extra step you’ll have to go through when you just need to perform one single task). It gets trickier as soon as you click on one of the filetype tabs – there you’ll find a mixture of large icons representing various editing and conversion tasks in no particular order, making it difficult sometimes to be sure about what the program can and cannot do for you.
FormatFactory does support a wide range of common file formats in its various categories – Video, Audio, Picture, and Document. From MP4 to MKV and from WebM to GIF; from FLAC to APE and from MP3 to DTS; from EPUB to MOBI and from PDF to DOC, all the most widely used video, audio, and document formats are well represented. When it comes to the “disc conversion” tab (namely ROM Device\DVD\CD\ISO), this section offers you BD to MKV, DVD to video file, and music CD to audio file ripping options, together with a couple of ISO-related utilities. The editing functionality available is a bit irregular – you can clip and crop video files, divide and clip audio files, resize and watermark images, and encrypt and decrypt PDF files.
What I really love about this tool – apart from the fact that it is completely free to download and use – is its amazing ability to batch all kinds of tasks in all kinds of formats and codecs, and then perform all of them in one single operation for the user. How useful is that? If only for this amazing feature, I recommend you download, check, and put this tool’s batch capabilities to the test. You may find that some of the conversion or editing tasks you were looking for are missing, but rest assured that all the other functions available work like a charm.
