Distill
Distill is one of the study tools in The Playground. Give it a file, an archive or a whole folder. Distill takes it apart and shows what it is made of: every part, where it sits, how large it is, and how much of the file the parts account for.
Drop files or a folder here, or choose them. Everything is read in this tab. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing in a file is run.
How to read a report
The strip is the file from its first byte to its last. Each part is drawn at its place and width, with a colour and a mark for its kind. The grey bars under it show how dense the bytes are along the file: low for text and tables, full height for packed data.
- Header or signature
- Named block
- Index or table
- Packed or raw data
- File inside
- Section of text
- Not accounted for
The format is read from the bytes, so a renamed file is still named for what it is. An archive is opened, and each file inside gets its own report, archives inside archives included. A folder gets one root hash for its bytes and names together, and files that repeat byte for byte are listed.
The same bytes always give the same report. Save it as JSON to keep it or to compare two files later.
What it reads today
PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, WAV, AVI, MP4, MOV, HEIC, AVIF, FLAC, MP3 tags, TrueType and OpenType fonts, ZIP (and the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB and Java files built on it), gzip, tar, PDF, WebAssembly, SQLite, Windows and ELF programs, JSON, HTML, SVG, XML, Markdown, tables in text, and plain text. Anything else still gets its size, hash and density, and is named as not recognised.
Not yet: WebM and Matroska film, Ogg sound, RAR and 7z archives, and the pixels or samples inside media files. Encrypted archive entries are listed and left closed.