FH is a general-purpose glancer-at-files: all it does is extract useful descriptive information from the header of the file it is given. At the moment it's concentrating on media files (video clips, shockwave, images, audio files, etc), but the plan is to extend it gradually until it can read whatever is thrown at it.
It has been written in a way that makes it easily extensible, and the hope is that people will contribute to its growth.
At the moment it's really just a thin wrapper around a collection of file-reading modules like Image::Size and Video::Info. Loading of those modules is deferred until it's needed, but the potential memory bulge is quite high, so we'll probably end up rewriting it to peek directly at file rather than borrowing such a simple ability from more versatile modules. This has already been done with SWF::Header, in the absence of a simple reader of shockwave files.
No download is provided here, since it can be installed from CPAN and has quite a long list of dependencies that are best dealt with that way.
last updated 3rd December 2004