Data Formats: 3D, Audio, Image | Hacker News Reader

Data Formats: 3D, Audio, Image

paulbourke.net

78 pointsgbarletta18 comments

If this is of interest, Wikidata contains a huge amount of data on file formats. For example, [1] is a huge list of file formats and [2] is a list of documentation or source code (structs etc) describing file formats. Other data includes links to other file format information databses such as PRONOM, LOC and NARA, magic sequences to identify files of a particular format, and links to source code as parsers of file formats.

Where most people would say "It's a JPEG file", the data within Wikidata breaks that down into the detail of different versions of JFIF, SPIFF, EXIF, etc that are all have different internal formats, even though the file extensions and media types are common.

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Informati...

[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Informati...

I got my hopes up for understanding TIFF better, but alas I could not find any references I hadn't seen before. I have trouble generating anything but the most basic TIFF without getting into trouble with various consumers.

If you notice, a lot of the more esoteric 3D formats listed on wikidata link right back to the paulbourke.net site from this post, it's a small world!

Nice list. USD (Universal Scene Description) has been renamed to OpenUSD. Part of the motivation was to make it easier to search for. Not all the official docs have been updated yet though.

A strategic move

Given USD is in the list, I am a little bit surprised that alembic (.abc) isn't.

Another good web site for media data formats is https://wiki.multimedia.cx

Handy resource. Thanks.

Is see IFF is missing from that list. Used to be popular in the Amiga world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_File_Format

Lots of popular formats are missing (JPEG, PNG) so I guess the author focuses more on ones that are not "too well-known"?

Well there are formats like AIFF and WAVE, see here:

https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/audio/

These are more or less direct descendants of IFF so to speak (WAVE being based on RIFF, which is essentially little-endian IFF), the page also mentions as much:

"Audio IFF conforms to the "EA IFF 85" Standard for Interchange Format Files developed by Electronic Arts."

IFF was a popular image format at the time.

Would that have been ILBM specifically? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILBM

I wasn't using Amigas at that time, I had an Atari... I vaguely remember Targa files (.tga)

DeluxePaint used IFF. Here's a good writeup https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2012/06/iff-file-forma...

No mention of DICOM which is the de facto medical image format. It also supports ECG.

Good old Paul Bourke! Amazing how many interesting things he's covered on his site! Love that it's basically static html too, always nice and snappy!

A treasure trove of information

Its down right now but the ArchiveTeam file formats wiki is pretty good too. http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/

This is awesome! I haven't found this detailed of a description of the vox format in one place anywhere. This will help me a ton on my hobby project for which I wrote my own vox library to write files.

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