FIDO (Format Identification for Digital Objects) is a Python command line tool to identify the file formats of digital objects. A lot of improvements to the code and functionality have been made.
We have created a testing framework based on the Govdocs1 digital Corpora (http://digitalcorpora.org/corpora/files), and are using the characterisation results from Forensic Innovations, Inc. ((http://www.forensicinnovations.com/), as ground truths.
We have tested Tika 1.0, Fido 0.9.6 and Droid 6.0 with the V45 signature file.
Tika generally performs best for all the 20 most common formats. Especially for text files (text/plain), it is the only tested tool that correctly identifies the files.
Tika is the fastests of the tools, and Fido is the slowest.
The new FIDO (Format Identification for Digital Objects) is here, version 0.9.6.
Improvements:
Open Planets Foundation is proud to present: Fido.jar. A java port of the Python version of Fido (Format Identification for Digital Objects). This first version runs on all platforms with Java 6 update 23 or later installed.
Fido is a simple format identification tool for digital objects that uses Pronom signatures. It converts signatures into regular expressions and applies them directly. Fido is free, Apache 2.0 licensed, easy to install, and runs on Windows and Linux. Most importantly, Fido is very fast.