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Ashley Blewer ➫ Browse by tags ➬ My homepage ➫ Work with me ➬ Mailing list ➬ ? | ? | ? | ? | ? Researching file formats 37: Portable Embosser Format 10 May 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Portable Embosser Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. The Portable Embosser Format (PEF) is a document type that represents braille pages in digital form, accurately and unambiguously; regardless of language, location, embosser settings, braille code and computer environment” (source). Not a lot of info... Read more Researching file formats 36: Windows Phone Installation Package 03 May 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Silverlight Application Package. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Okay, this was a fun one! If you remember using Netflix in the early-to-mid 2010s, you might remember having to download this extra thing called Silverlight in order to stream video. For reasons that I would... Read more Researching file formats 35: Apple ProRaw 26 Apr 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Apple ProRAW. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This blog post from Lux on Understanding ProRaw” is useful not just in what it purports to do, but as an overall explainer for how digital cameras work these days. It’s great! And it explains the format... Read more Researching file formats 34: iOS App Store Package 19 Apr 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: IPA. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Like last week’s post on the Android package, the iOS App Store Package is also… (dun dun dun)… just a ZIP archive file! It’s also not really well-disclosed, with no official docs from Apple that specify the .ipa... Read more Researching file formats 33: Android Package 12 Apr 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: APK. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. First off, this work was made incredibly easier thanks to the work of Johan van der Knijff, particularly the blog series around working with mobile apps, the latest being Towards a preservation workflow for mobile apps” from 2021,... Read more Researching file formats 27: Core Audio Format 05 Apr 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Apple Core Audio Format. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Core Audio Format (CAF) is a file format for storing and transporting digital audio data. It’s published by Apple. Fully disclosed, thoroughly, with helpful contextual statements. It was introduced in 2005. I am a bit... Read more Researching file formats 31: XYZ Point Cloud 29 Mar 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. After a handful of difficult and technically (or socially/politically) complex formats, it was nice to work on this simple (if unspecified) format, taking me back to one of the earliest formats I worked on, FASTA. This format originally belonged in that initial category (see RGBE Image Format), but there was a mix-up. While it is structurally... Read more Researching file formats 30: Autodesk Maya Binary 22 Mar 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. You know, I saved a spot for this format but it really is essentially the same as last week’s, except stored in a binary format instead of a text-based one. I checked to see if it was simply gzipped, but it wasn’t – it’s its own secret-sauce thing courtesy of Autodesk (as usual, comments welcome, maybe... Read more Researching file formats 29: Autodesk Maya Project 15 Mar 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. This format described 3D scenes – geometry, lighting, animation, rendering, other stuff. It’s fairly straightforward, and I felt the documentation was relatively thorough while being succinct. Preservation issues seem to mostly be around concerns with this file needing to be connected to other files: Here’s what the specification has to say about this format: If you... Read more Researching file formats 28: Virtual Reality Modeling Language 08 Mar 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. I was getting so overwhelmed surfing the old web for this format. It was absolutely thrilling but exhausting too, like when you’re on your 13th day of vacation and you’re so worn out but there’s so much more to see. Nothing is more exciting to me than looking into VIRTUAL WORLDS. I felt like it looked... Read more Researching file formats 27: Microstation DGN 01 Mar 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. This format was really a family of formats, and there’s specifically a break between an older version of the format, documented, and a later version of the format, semi-documented. At the time of writing this blog post, I still have some work to do in sorted out all the details and nuances here, when there’s not... Read more Researching file formats 26: 3DM 23 Feb 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. The next six formats are part of Set 3: 3D, VR and Animation! All of these formats are quite different from each other (except two closely related, which will be obvious). First up: 3DM. Rhino 3D Model file format family. Or the openNURBS 3D model? Something important to note off the top is that openNURBS is... Read more Researching file formats 25: Nullsoft Streaming Video 16 Feb 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Nullsoft Streaming Video. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Support for more codecs will be added soon.” – Nullsoft, 2004 Last week was an audio codec, this week is an audio/video container. (See my training site for nuances there, if needed!) And it’s a container... Read more Researching file formats 24: Unified Speech and Audio Coding 09 Feb 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Unified Speech and Audio Coding. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. Okay, this format was hard! First, the format is standardized via ISO/IEC, which means it’s expensive. Next, the specification is extremely long and technical, with lots of math. And this is my area of... Read more Researching file formats 23: Audio Definition Model 01 Feb 2024 This blog post is part of a series on file formats research. See this introduction post for more information. Update: The official format definition is now online here: Audio Definition Model. Comments welcome directly to the Library of Congress. This format is about audio, but it’s a text-based document that describes audio. You can say it defines an audio model. It is typically stored as XML, but JSON is a valid option, too. While the... Read more Older...