I’ve noticed some files I opened in a text editor have all kinds of crazy unrenderable chars

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    How is it representing it tho? Like does it have woven in there an array of hexcode colors for every microscopic pixel that makea up the picture.

    Are images and audio files just arrays of frames which are arrays of pixels and sound units?

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      2 months ago

      It just converts the raw binary data into character encoding, so it doesn’t matter what the source is (image, video, database file, etc). The source binary data is taken 6 bits at a time, then this group of 6 bits is mapped to one of 64 unique characters.

      The decoding process is just the reverse of that: mapping the data back to binary form.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

    • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      the answer to your how question is as needed.

      some image and audio formats (especially older ones) are like that, yes. others use compression or other techniques to suit their need. like a sound can be a raw recording sample. or a sound can be described with Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release, along with octave and note etc. so a MIDI file is an audio file format without samples.

      i once created an image format to be used for spiraling out images, instead of pixel arrays they were concentric circles of pixels that i could easily offset.