X-Ripper is a tool for locating and extracting images, audio or videos from other files. It's aimed at helping you extract content from a game library - soundtrack, images, cut scene videos and more - but can also extract JPEGs from a PDF file, find the images from a DLL, and more.

One very notable problem is there's no MP3 support, but otherwise X-Ripper does support a good range of file types, covering audio (WAV, OGG, WMA, MID, VOC, AU, AIF), image (BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, DDS, GIF, TGA, TIF) and video (AVI, WMV, SMK, BIK). And in theory you can add support for other file types yourself via the program's X-Ripper.ini file, although this does require some knowledge of the file format.

While all this sounds quite complex, X-Ripper itself turns out to be implausibly small - just a single 120KB executable. And it's also very easy to use: select the file to scan, the output folder and file formats to locate, click "Start Searching" and the program will try to detect and remove them for you.

We say "try" because this won't always happen. X-Ripper doesn't understand the format of the file it's scanning, it just scans it as a simple binary stream, and if that happens to be compressed, encrypted or similarly manipulated then the program won't find anything at all.

Some files don't seem to be detected or extracted properly, either; in a few cases X-Ripper claimed to have found some TGA files in our test files, but they didn't seem to be viewable images.

Generally, though, the program worked very well for us. We pointed it at some PDFs and it extracted the JPEGs just fine, and using C:\Windows\System32\Imageres.dll created more than 600 PNGs of various Windows icons and other graphics: very easy.