.nfo (also written .NFO or NFO, a contraction of "info", or "

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

") is a

filename extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (for example, .txt, .mp3, .exe) that indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically d ...

for text files that accompany

warez scene The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground network of piracy groups specialized in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media before their official release date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, incl ...

releases of

pirated Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, ...

software or media. NFO files contain information about the release, such as the digital media title, authorship, year, or license information. This information is delivered for publishing through digital media to make it searchable on the web as well as within local catalogues and libraries.

Content

NFO files usually contain release information about the media. The information may include authorship and license information. If the NFO file is for software, product installation notes can also be found. "NFOs are text files that contain descriptions about the media. If the NFO is for software, you will probably find product installation notes such as CDKEYS or serial numbers, in this text file." NFO files are also often found in

demoscene The demoscene () is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off computer programmi ...

productions, where the respective groups include them for credits, contact details, and the software requirements. Unlike

README In software distribution and software development, a README file (computing), file contains information about the other files in a directory (file systems), directory or archive (computing), archive of computer software. A form of Software doc ...

files, NFO files often contain elaborate ANSI art.

History

NFO files were first introduced by "Fabulous Furlough" of the elite PC warez organization called

The Humble Guys The Humble Guys (THG) were a cracking group for the IBM PC during the late 1980s founded by two friends known by the pseudonyms Candyman and Fabulous Furlough. The group was also noticed in the demoscene for some of their cracktros. THG was th ...

, or THG. The THG group would first upload their package to their world headquarters, "Candyland BBS" or later "The P.I.T.S. BBS", to establish distribution immediately. Such organizations are also known as

warez group A warez group is a tightly organised group of people involved in creating and/or distributing warez such as movies, music or software ("warez") in Warez scene, The Scene. There are different types of these groups in the Scene: ''release groups'' an ...

s or crack groups. The first use came in 1990 on the THG release of the PC game '' Knights of Legend''. This file was used in lieu of the more common README.TXT or README.1ST file names. The perpetuation of this file extension legacy was carried on by warez groups which followed after THG and is still in use to this day. Hence its strong presence on

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

newsgroups that carry binaries and on P2P file trading networks. The Humble Guys later became a

demogroup Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene. Groups frequently consist of students, young computer enthusiasts who spen ...

, thus bringing the .nfo file tradition into the demoscene. More than forty thousand demoscene productions have an NFO file next to the program file. Before

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

was introduced, NFO files also sometimes used ANSI-escape sequences to generate animated ASCII art ( ANSI art). These animations, however, required ANSI.SYS to be loaded by the

DOS shell DOS Shell is a file manager that debuted in MS-DOS and PC DOS version 4.0, released in June 1988. It was no longer included in MS-DOS version 6, but remained part of the Supplemental Disk. The Supplemental Disk could be ordered or could b ...

. If the user's computer wasn't already configured to load the ANSI.SYS driver, viewing ANSI art required reconfiguring and rebooting. Because of this, ANSI art was much less common, and getting ANSI art to display correctly on a Windows 95 PC often proved more difficult, leading to a decline of such art in NFO files. The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)

code page 437 Code page 437 ( CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or MS-DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (di ...

character set was originally designed by IBM for the earliest DOS PCs so many years ago. Therefore, it was not destined to become standardized throughout the non-English world. Recently to aid internationalization, instead of using the old code page 437 extended ASCII characters, modern ASCII art uses the current de facto web standard

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...

ISO-8859-15 ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

characters.

Usage of NFO files in publishing of warez

The files have been explained as essentially being the

press release A press release (also known as a media release) is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing new information, creating an official statement, or making an announcement directed for public releas ...

s of the warez scene. They are commonly associated with warez groups who include them to declare credit of said release. NFO files were ubiquitous, and sometimes required, during the era of the BBS. The file was a stamp of authenticity, explicitly explaining what group released the software and described what modifications (or cracks) were applied if any. Once a software was "packaged" with an NFO and then released, it was then officially owned by that group and no other group could ethically re-release that particular package. A typical warez NFO file was elaborate and highly decorated, and usually included a large

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) character (computing), characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCI ...

logo along with software release and extended warez group information. The most important information is which group, which cracker and which member actually tested and packaged. The designers of these NFO files, who worked closely or within the warez groups, frequently incorporated

extended ASCII Extended ASCII is a repertoire of character encodings that include (most of) the original 96 ASCII character set, plus up to 128 additional characters. There is no formal definition of "extended ASCII", and even use of the term is sometimes critic ...

characters from the character set

in the file. As of 2019, NFO files can still be found in many ZIP archives. In modern-day warez NFO files, a large ASCII art logo is frequently shown at the top, followed by textual information below.

Software

The

home theater A home cinema, also called home theater, is a home entertainment audio-visual system that seeks to reproduce a movie theater experience and mood using consumer grade electronic video and audio equipment and is set up in a private home. In t ...

software

Kodi Kodi may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * KODI, a radio station in Cody, Wyoming, USA * Kodi (film), ''Kodi'' (film), India, 2016 * Kodi, a dog in the 2004 film ''Balto III: Wings of Change'' Other uses * Kodi (software), an open sour ...

uses NFO files for its library. Plex Media Server uses NFO files for match movie library. Filebot app fetch artwork and create NFO files for TV shows or movies. NFO files are also used by media managers ViMediaManager, tinyMediaManager, Ember Media Manager, CouchPotato - a usenet and torrents client, MediaElch, TV show organiser Media Companion, digital media library manager Media Center Master. An NFO plug-in is also available for

Opus Opus (: opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera ...

, an open access repositories software. NFO files are plain text files. The simplest method to view is using a

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

and selecting a

monospace font A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with Typeface#Proportion, variable-width fonts, where t ...

and set "US Latin" or "extended ASCII". On

using Microsoft Notepad the Terminal font set to 11pt usually produced a good rendering of ascii art on common CRTs of the time and could be set as the default viewer NFO files. However, web browsers use an incompatible alternative encoding scheme resulting in incorrect rendering of NFO files. Also, many modern text editors often use

proportional font A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, bold), slope (e.g., italic), width ...

s whereas the ASCII art included in both old and new NFO files is heavily dependent on the file being viewed with a fixed-width font. For this reason dedicated NFO viewers are available which are text editors with appropriate fonts (such as Terminus) and encoding settings, automatic window size and clickable hyperlinks. Additionally, online NFO viewers are also available to browse public NFO databases.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, the NFO filename extension is associated with a Microsoft software tool called ''System Information'' (msinfo32.exe). System Information provides a general overview of a computer's system specifications as well as detailed information on the system's hardware components and information about the Windows environment. NFO files that are meant for System Information contain all of the information that System Information displays saved in an XML format.

References