Format Factory 5

Overview

Format Factory does one thing and has done it since the era when phones came with memory cards: it takes a file in whatever form it arrived in and writes it out in the form you need. Video, audio, image, document and disc image conversion all live behind the same grid of buttons on the left, and the queue in the middle processes whatever you drop into it. It is not elegant and it has never pretended to be, but it reads formats that newer converters have forgotten about and it does not fail halfway through a batch.

This build has the advertising panel, the bundled toolbar offers and the promoted software page removed from the installer and from the interface. What is left is the converter and its queue. There is no telemetry component, no update check on launch and nothing added to the browser.

What it will convert

On the video side it covers the current delivery formats and a long tail of older ones, with presets grouped by device as well as by format for anyone who would rather pick a target than set a bitrate. Each preset can be opened and edited: codec, bitrate mode, resolution, frame rate, aspect handling, audio stream selection and subtitle burn in are all exposed. Multiple audio and subtitle tracks in a source can be picked from rather than being flattened silently.

Audio conversion covers the lossy and lossless formats with the same preset and manual approach, including sample rate and channel conversion, volume normalisation and a fade in and out on the ends. Image conversion handles the still formats with resizing, rotation and a watermark option, and runs comfortably over a folder of several thousand files. Disc images can be converted between formats or have their contents extracted.

The tools people forget are in here

There is a joiner that concatenates several clips into one file without re-encoding when the sources match, which is the fastest way to stitch together a set of camera clips. There is a trimmer that cuts a range out of a source and writes it directly, again without re-encoding where possible. There is a ripper for pulling audio out of a video into a separate file, and a mixer that lays a new audio track over an existing video.

The repair tool is the one worth knowing about. A file with a damaged index, which happens when a recording is interrupted, will often be unplayable but not actually broken. The repair pass rebuilds the index and produces a file that plays. It does not recover missing data, but it recovers a surprising number of recordings that looked lost.

Batch behaviour and output

The queue is the reason it stays installed. Add a hundred files, set one output profile, start it, and walk away. Failures are logged per file and the queue continues rather than stopping, and the log names what went wrong. Output goes to a folder you set once, with an option to mirror the source folder structure, and there is a shutdown on completion checkbox for overnight batches.

Hardware acceleration is available for encoding and decoding on the NVIDIA, Intel and AMD paths, selectable per job. On a long batch this is the difference between an afternoon and an hour. Where the hardware encoder cannot handle a requested setting it falls back to software rather than failing the job.

What you get

• Video, audio, image, document and disc image conversion in one window
• Device and format presets, all fully editable down to codec and bitrate
• Multiple audio and subtitle track selection from a source file
• Clip joining and trimming without re-encoding where sources match
• Audio extraction and audio replacement on an existing video
• Index repair for interrupted recordings that will not play
• Batch queue that logs failures per file and continues
• Hardware acceleration on the NVIDIA, Intel and AMD paths with software fallback
• Advertising panel, bundled offers and update check removed

Inside the archive

• Format Factory 5 application, offline installer
• Full codec and muxer set, nothing downloaded on first use
• Device and format preset library
• Language packs for the interface list shown above
• Notes describing what was stripped from the installer

System requirements

Installing it

1. Unpack the archive to a local folder.
2. Run the installer as administrator. There are no bundled offer pages in this build.
3. Choose your interface language on the first run.
4. Set the output folder in options before starting a batch, since the default is inside the program folder.
5. If you intend to use hardware encoding, enable it in options and pick the path that matches your card.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

Comments

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