PNG - how to know which is the last byte? - actionscript-3

I am creating an AIR app that receives PNG data over the socket and they come in in chunks. How do I know when a byte received is the last byte?

You could decode it as it comes in, continuing until you reach the IEND chunk which marks the end of the png. All you need to do is read the 4 byte length and 4 byte chunk type and then skip ahead length+4 bytes, continuing until the chunk type == IEND. Check out the chunk specification for more info.
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Structure.html

Related

Zero-padded h264 in mdat

I'd like to do some stuff with h.264 data recorded from Android phone.
My colleague told me there should be 4 bytes right after mdat wich specifies NALU size, then one byte with NALU metadata and then the raw data, and then (after NALU size), another 4 bytes with another NALU size and so on.
But I have a lot of zeros right after mdat: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 mdat atom are just ftyp mp42, isom mp42 and free atoms. All other atoms (moov, ...) are at the end of the file (that's what Android does, when it writes to socket and not to the file). But If necessary, I've got PPS and SPS from other file with same camera and encoder settings recorded just a seond before this, just to get those PPS and SPS data.
So how exactly can i get NALUs from that?
You can't. The moov atom contains information required to parse the mdat. Without it the mdat has little value. For instance, the first NALU does not need to start at the begining of the mdat, It can start anywhere within the mdat. The byte it starts at is recorded in (I believe) the stco box. If the file has audio, you will find audio and video mixed within mdat with no way to determine what is what without the chunk offsets. In addition, if the video has B frames, there is no way to determine render order without the cts, again only available in the moov. And Technically, the nalu size does not need to be 4 bytes and you cant know that without the moov. I recommend not used mp4. Use a streamable container such as ts or flv. Now if you can make some assumption about the code that is producing the file; Like the chunk offset is always the same, and there is no b frames, you can hard code these values. But is not guaranteed to work after a software update.

240 bit radar word

I Have a project using a 240 bit Octal data format that will be coming in the serial port of Arduino uno at 2.4K RS232 converted to TTL.
The 240 bits along with other things has range, azimuth and elevation words, which is what I need to display.
The frame starts with a frame sync code wich is an alternating binary 7 bit code which is:
1110010 for frame 1 and
0001101 for frame 2 and so on.
I was thinking that I might use something like val = serial.read command like
if (val = 1110010 or 0001101) { data++val; }`
that will let me validate the start of my sting.
The rest of the 240 bit octal frame (all numbers) can be serial read to a string of which only parts will be needed to be printed to the screen.
Past the frame sync, all octal data is serial with no Nulls or delimiters so I am thinking
printf("%.Xs",stringname[xx]);
will let me off set the characters as needed so they can be parsed out.
How do I tell the program that the frame sync its looking for is binary or that the data that needs to go into the string is octal, or that it may need to be converted to be read on the screen?

Searching through very large rainbow table file

I am looking for the best way to search through a very large rainbow table file (13GB file). It is a CSV-style file, looking something like this:
1f129c42de5e4f043cbd88ff6360486f; somestring
78f640ec8bf82c0f9264c277eb714bcf; anotherstring
4ed312643e945ec4a5a1a18a7ccd6a70; yetanotherstring
... you get the idea - there are about ~900 Million lines, always with a hash, semicolon, clear text string.
So basically, the program should look if a specific hash is lited in this file.
Whats the fastest way to do this?
Obviously, I can't read the entire file into memory and then put a strstr() on it.
So whats the most efficent way to do this?
read file line by line, always to a strstr();
read larger chunk of the file (e.g. 10.000 lines), do a strstr()
Or would it be more efficient import all this data into an MySQL database and then search for the hash via SQL querys?
Any help is appreciated
The best way to do it would be to sort it and then use a binary search-like algorithm on it. After sorting it, it will take around O(log n) time to find a particular entry where n is the number of entries you have. Your algorithm might look like this:
Keep a start offset and end offset. Initialize the start offset to zero and end offset to the file size.
If start = end, there is no match.
Read some data from the offset (start + end) / 2.
Skip forward until you see a newline. (You may need to read more, but if you pick an appropriate size (bigger than most of your records) to read in step 3, you probably won't have to read any more.)
If the hash you're on is the hash you're looking for, go on to step 6.
Otherwise, if the hash you're on is less than the hash you're looking for, set start to the current position and go to step 2.
If the hash you're on is greater than the hash you're looking for, set end to the current position and go to step 2.
Skip to the semicolon and trailing space. The unhashed data will be from the current position to the next newline.
This can be easily converted into a while loop with breaks.
Importing it into MySQL with appropriate indices and such would use a similarly (or more, since it's probably packed nicely) efficient algorithm.
Your last solution might be the easiest one to implement as you move the whole performance optimizing to the database (and usually they are optimized for that).
strstr is not useful here as it searches a string, but you know a specific format and can jump and compare more goal oriented. Thing about strncmp, and strchr.
The overhead for reading a single line would be really high (as it is often the case for file IO). So I'd recommend reading a larger chunk and perform your search on that chunk. I'd even think about parallelizing the search by reading the next chunk in another thread and do comparison there aswell.
You can also think about using memory mapped IO instead of the standard C file API. Using this you can leave the whole contents loading to the operating system and don't have to care about caching yourself.
Of course restructuring the data for faster access would help you too. For example insert padding bytes so all datasets are equally long. This will provide you "random" access to your data stream as you can easily calculate the position of the nth entry.
I'd start by splitting the single large file into 65536 smaller files, so that if the hash begins with 0000 it's in the file 00/00data.txt, if the hash begins with 0001 it's in the file 00/01data.txt, etc. If the full file was 12 GiB then each of the smaller files would be (on average) 208 KiB.
Next, separate the hash from the string; such that you've got 65536 "hash files" and 65536 "string files". Each hash file would contain the remainder of the hash (the last 12 digits only, because the first 4 digits aren't needed anymore) and the offset of the string in the corresponding string file. This would mean that (instead of 65536 files at an average of 208 KiB each) you'd have 65536 hash files at maybe 120 KiB each and 65536 string files at maybe 100 KiB each.
Next, the hash files should be in a binary format. 12 hexadecimal digits costs 48 bits (not 12*8=96-bits). This alone would halve the size of the hash files. If the strings are aligned on a 4 byte boundary in the strings file then a 16-bit "offset of the string / 4" would be fine (as long as the string file is less than 256 KiB). Entries in the hash file should be sorted in order, and the corresponding strings file should be in the same order.
After all these changes; you'd use the highest 16-bits of the hash to find the right hash file, load the hash file and do a binary search. Then (if found) you'd get the offset for the start of the string (in the strings file) from entry in the hash file, plus get the offset for the next string from next entry in the hash file. Then you'd load data from the strings file, starting at the start of the correct string and ending at the start of the next string.
Finally, you'd implement a "hash file cache" in memory. If your application can allocate 1.5 GiB of RAM, then that'd be enough to cache half of the hash files. In this case (half the hash files cached) you'd expect that half the time the only thing you'd need to load from disk is the string itself (e.g. probably less than 20 bytes) and the other half the time you'd need to load the hash file into the cache first (e.g. 60 KiB); so on average for each lookup you'd be loading about 30 KiB from disk. Of course more memory is better (and less is worse); and if you can allocate more than about 3 GiB of RAM you can cache all of the hash files and start thinking about caching some of the strings.
A faster way would be to have a reversible encoding, so that you can convert a string into an integer and then convert the integer back into the original string without doing any sort of lookup at all. For an example; if all your strings use lower case ASCII letters and are a max. of 13 characters long, then they could all be converted into a 64-bit integer and back (as 26^13 < 2^63). This could lead to a different approach - e.g. use a reversible encoding (with bit 64 of the integer/hash clear) where possible; and only use some sort of lookup (with bit 64 of the integer/hash set) for strings that can't be encoded in a reversible way. With a little knowledge (e.g. carefully selecting the best reversible encoding for your strings) this could slash the size of your 13 GiB file down to "small enough to fit in RAM easily" and be many orders of magnitude faster.

Is there a fast way of adding or removing content in the middle of a very large file

Say I have a very large file (say > 1GB) and I want to add a single character in the middle of it. Is it possible to do this without reading and writing the whole file out? My current solution is this (in pseudocode):
x = 0
chunk = read 4KB chunk x of input file
if chunkToEdit = x, chunk = addCharacter(chunk)
append chunk to the output file
x = x + 1
repeat last 4 steps until input file is fully read
delete input file
move output file to input file
While that works, it results in 1GB of reading, and 1GB of writing to make a single character change. It also requires a spare 1GB of disk space. What I would rather do is modify the part of the file that needs to be changed in place, so I only have to read and write one part of the file (ie 4KB of reading, and 4KB of writing). Is this possible (or a solution better than my one)?
I thought a solution for this could be possible by the OS fragmenting the file and making a new fragment for the changed section, but I don't know if this capability has been written and exposed to developers.
No. Files don't work like that. If you need to change the size of the file then you need to operate from the modification point to the end.
Unless you're using a file format that can handle insertions/deletions cleanly, but it sounds like you aren't.
Adding a single character in the middle necessarily requires shifting everything after this one character by one character. This necessarily requires that you read and write everything from the point of insertion to the end of the file. A way that uses as little memory as possible to do so would be:
i = 0
read last (n byte * i) of file
write back to file shifted by 1 character
i++
repeat until reaching the point of insertion
write single character
In other words: shift everything in chunks of n bytes by one character starting from the end going backwards through the file to the point of insertion, then insert the character. The farther back in the file you want to insert the character, the faster this will be. If you often want to insert near the beginning of the file, this may not be the best solution.

Why is it useful to know how to convert between numeric bases?

We are learning about converting Binary to Decimal (and vice-versa) as well as other base-conversion methods, but I don't understand the necessity of this knowledge.
Are there any real-world uses for converting numbers between different bases?
When dealing with Unicode escape codes— '\u2014' in Javascript is — in HTML
When debugging— many debuggers show all numbers in hex
When writing bitmasks— it's more convenient to specify powers of two in hex (or by writing 1 << 4)
In this article I describe a concrete use case. In short, suppose you have a series of bytes you want to transfer using some transport mechanism, but you cannot simply pass the payload as bytes, because you are not able to send binary content. Let's say you can only use 64 characters for encoding the payload. A solution to this problem is to convert the bytes (8-bit characters) into 6-bit characters. Here the number conversion comes into play. Consider the series of bytes as a big number whose base is 256. Then convert it into a number with base 64 and you are done. Each digit of the new base 64 number now denotes a character of your encoded payload...
If you have a device, such as a hard drive, that can only have a set number of states, you can only count in a number system with that many states.
Because a computer's byte only have on and off, you can only represent 0 and 1. Therefore a base2 system is used.
If you have a device that had 3 states, you could represent 0, 1 and 2, and therefore count in a base 3 system.