Recode 0.2.0

Convert images between formats from the Explorer context menu. Right click, pick
a format, and the converted file appears next to the original. Originals are
never deleted.

Nine formats, every readable one to every writable one: JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF,
GIF, HEIC, HEIF, AVIF and WebP. Everything needed is in the archive. There is
nothing to fetch from the Microsoft Store.

Download

Your machine	File
Most Windows PCs	Recode-0.2.0-x64.zip
Snapdragon, Surface Pro X, other ARM	Recode-0.2.0-arm64.zip

Unblock the archive before unpacking, or Windows will refuse to run the scripts:

Unblock-File .\Recode-0.2.0-x64.zip

Unpack it somewhere it can stay, then pick one of two menus.

Two menus

Classic menu. No administrator rights, no certificate, works on Windows 10
and 11. On Windows 11 it lives under "Show more options".

pwsh -File tools\install-context-menu.ps1

First Windows 11 menu. Puts Convert to in the menu that opens on a right
click, alongside Paint and the other packaged entries. Needs administrator
rights once, from an elevated PowerShell.

pwsh -File tools\install-shell-extension.ps1

The elevation is not a preference. That menu accepts only a COM handler declared
by a packaged application, Windows registers a package only if it is signed by a
certificate the machine trusts, and trusting a certificate is machine wide.
There is no per user route to it.

Either menu works on its own. Both can be installed at once.

Keep the folder where you put it: the packaged menu points at it rather than
copying from it.

New in 0.2.0

• The first Windows 11 context menu, through an IExplorerCommand handler
  compiled ahead of time and loaded in a COM surrogate, so no runtime has to
  start before the menu can be drawn.
• The packaged menu's file type list is generated from formats.json, like the
  registry keys, so the two menus cannot offer different formats.
• Entries hide themselves rather than grey out. A text file offers nothing, and
  a PNG is never offered a conversion to PNG.
• tools\diagnose-shell-extension.ps1 reports which precondition failed when
  the packaged entry does not appear, which otherwise fails silently.

The full list is in CHANGELOG.md.

Not code signed

Windows SmartScreen will warn the first time. Choose "More info" then "Run
anyway".

If your machine enforces the Defender rule "Block executable files from running
unless they meet a prevalence, age, or trusted list criterion", Recode is blocked
with an access denied error. That is a policy decision by whoever manages the
machine. Ask them for an exclusion rather than working around it.

Licences

Recode is MIT. The bundled libraries are not: libheif and libde265 are LGPL-3.0
and ship as separate, replaceable DLLs loaded at run time, which is what lets
this project stay MIT. HEVC encoding uses kvazaar rather than x265, deliberately,
because x265 is GPL.

HEVC, which is what HEIC files contain, is covered by patent pools. Recode
provides HEVC support the way other open source projects do and grants no patent
licence. AVIF is royalty free.

Full texts are in third-party-licenses inside the archive.