posted April 24, 2017 #
I spent some time over the weekend doing some light research on
Datamoshing - the act of purposefully corrupting a video file to create digital glitches and effects. This
primer is a good place to start if you're unfamiliar with the whole concept and then you can dive a bit deeper with sites like
Datamoshing.com. Overall, here are some key takeways:
- In general, there's two techniques for datamoshing - removing an I-Frame or duplicating P-frames. To properly understand both techniques you need a basic understanding of how video compression works with keyframes (I-Frame) and predictive frames (P-Frames). At the heart of it, you're exploiting this methodology to trick the formats own display techniques.
- Moshy is an open source utility kit that can, supposedly, help you prep your files for moshing. I had little success with it but need to dig in more.
- AVI Demux is a simple video editor that will let you destroy keyframes and duplicate P-Frames, if you can manage to navigate the awkward interface.
- Hex Fiend - an easy to use Hex Editor for diving into the actual Hex code of a file and directly corrupting it. Powerful for datamoshing but also extremely easy to completely corrupt your file past the point of no return.
So far I've got zero results to share but I'm enjoying the learning experience.
