🎩✨ Breaking news: Yet another file format nobody asked for! Behold, the revolutionary .ptar 🔧 - because clearly, handling petabyte-scale #archive backups wasn't confusing enough. It's so simple, it requires a quick start, documentation, AND a demo just to comprehend! 😂📦
https://plakar.io/posts/2025-06-30/technical-deep-dive-into-.ptar-replacing-.tgz-for-petabyte-scale-s3-archives/ #fileformat #petabyte #backup #technews #innovation #humor #HackerNews #ngated

#fileformat Friday! Fresh Flux Fun with SCP. #digipres #floppydisks #obsolete_technology https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/06/27/scp/

Client-side file format identification and reporting pipeline with Siegfried and Demystify Lite

by @beet_keeper

With thanks to the sponsorship of Archives New Zealand and Richard Lehane for his great coding expertise and his collaboration; Demystify Lite has a new feature — Siegfried!!

Richard recently posted about this work on LinkedIn but lets look at this effort in more detail below.

#Archives #Coding #digipres #DigitalArchiving #DigitalPreservation #DROID #FileFormat #Golang #siegfried #SoftwareDevelopment

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

by @beet_keeper

In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.

Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.

#Code #Coding #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #FileFormat #FileFormatAnalysis #FileFormats #kaitai #PRONOM #YYYY

#fileformat Friday! Finalize your miniDVD's! #digirpres #avpres #obsolete_technology https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/06/20/minidvd/

Internet Archive Blog: Keep on GIFin’ — A New Version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine!. “We are excited to announce a new version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine! GifCities was a special project of Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/06/14/internet-archive-blog-keep-on-gifin-a-new-version-of-gifcities-internet-archives-geocities-animated-gif-search-engine/

New blog post about #fileformat research for #digipres at the Library of Congress! Esp proud of our continuing work to document how/if specific file formats can support #accessibility features such as alt text, captions & structured tags for screen readers. Upcoming work includes EA PDF (a profile of PDF specifically for email archiving) and JUMBF (one of the formats related to C2PA manifests). Comments always welcome. CC @genfhk, Liz Holdzkom & Liz Caringola

https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/06/new-file-format-research/

So many people insist on making shitty GIFs from the 1990s, instead of any actual video format that came out in the 30 years since.
#GIF #video #fileformat #techliteracy #mpeg

#fileformat Friday! Color Grading with DaVinci Resolve's project format. #digipres #avpres https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/05/02/davinci-resolve/

File formats as Emoji: 0xffae

by @beet_keeper

tldr: https://emoji.exponentialdecay.co.uk

File Formats As Emoji (0xFFAE or 0xffae) might be my most random file format hack yet. Indeed, it is a random page generator! But it generates random pages of file formats represented as Emoji.

The idea came in 2016 with radare releasing a new version that supported an emoji hexdump. I wondered whether I could do something fun combining file formats and the radare output to create a web-page.

Along came a spare moment one weekend, some pyscript, and bit of sqlite, et voilà. File Formats as Emoji (0xFFAE) was made a reality.

#0xffae #Code #Coding #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #emoji #FileFormat #FileFormatIdentification #FileFormats #learning #PRONOM #pyscript #Python #SkeletonTestCorpus #teaching

@wyatt @kawa Until archive format overhead becomes the limiting factor for size.

At one point in early 2002, I briefly considered using the UNIX tape archive (tar) format to bundle assets in a Game Boy Advance game. Many of these assets were 2048 bytes or smaller. I looked up the spec for a POSIX tar file, and it involved rounding up each file's size to a multiple of the 512-byte block size and adding a 512-byte block header. That kind of overhead adds up. On top of that, searching for a particular file in a tarball takes linear time, not constant or even logarithmic time.

That led me to devise and document a simpler, more fit for purpose archive format called GBFS. Other specialized archive formats may benefit from packing files so as to avoid crossing 16K, 32K, 64K, or 128K block boundaries in the medium.

#FileFormats #gbadev #GameBoyAdvance #FileFormat #archives

#FileFormat mysteries (episode 14):

https://www.reparaturbonus.at/fileadmin/user_upload/pics/icons/mutterschluessel.png

thx to #unix #gnu #file-command:
Found out it's actually a WebP named as PNG. 😉 🤯

I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format

https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f316f7a02903276/XeePhotoshopLoader.m

#HackerNews #AdobePSD #Adobe #Photoshop #FileFormat #GraphicDesign #TechTalk

#fileformat Friday! Folder or File format? What is Scrivener? #digipres #Marchintosh #package https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/03/21/scrivener/

Huh.

Right this second is when I learned that the .mobi file format is owned by Amazon !

👀🤨🤔

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket

#Amazon #Monopoly #Monopolies #FileFormat #Ebooks

Hmmm, advice please.

So; say you're a #opensource #vector image editor and a volunteer pops in to help write a new compatibility to some proprietary #fileformat.

Say the volunteer makes progress and one day a brand new account claiming to be the founder at the #proprietary company of said format offering the volunteer a job.

To me; this is clearly a way to foreclose work on compatibility. The #foss equiv of buying out a competitor.

But how should the project moderate this kind of message?

#fileformat Friday! Camtasia, not Fantasia. #digipres #avpres https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/02/14/camtasia/

#fileformat Friday! Exploring Pro Tools Sessions. #digipres #macintosh #avpres https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2025/01/10/pro-tools-sessions/

Next in #38C3Saal1: Fearsome File Formats

https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/eins/hls

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/en/event/fearsome-file-formats/

#FileFormat #38C3

#fileformat Friday. Discovering details of Movie Master used by Eric Roth. #digipres #DOS #screenwriting https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2024/12/20/script-writing/