Each InnoDB tablespace file (with a name matching *.ibd) is tagged with the file format used to create its table and indexes. The way to modify the file format is to re-create the table and its indexes. The easiest way to recreate a table and its indexes is to use the following command on each table that you want to modify:

ALTER TABLE t ROW_FORMAT=format_name;

If you are modifying the file format to downgrade to an older MySQL version, there may be incompatibilities in table storage formats that require additional steps. For information about downgrading to a previous MySQL version, see Section 2.11, “Downgrading MySQL”.