File-To-BinaryVideo-BackTo-File

Encode any file to binary video, which can then be decoded back to the original file!

Prerequisites

• Golang, version: 1.22.1

brew install go

• ffmpeg, version: 6.1.1

brew install ffmpeg

Run Locally

• Clone the project
• Go to the project directory

cd File-To-BinaryVideo-BackTo-File

• Run the program

  go run . -inputfile "inputfilename.filetype" -cpuprofile cpuprof.prof

Program input parameters:

Example:

  go run . -inputfile test.png -cpuprofile cpuprof.prof -h 1080 -w 1920

Required parameters:

• inputfile: Path to file to be encoded to binary. Eg: -inputfile test.png
• cpuprofile: File name to save cpu profiling. Eg: -cpuprofile cpuprof.prof

Optional parameters:

• h: Frame height of the video. Eg: -h 1080
• w: Frame width of the video. Eg: -h 1920

Program output:

• binaryVideo.mp4: Binary video of the file.
• decodedFile.*filetype: Decoded file from the binary video.
• The programme also prints out the encode-decode execution time.

Demo

Screen.Recording.2024-04-27.at.1.14.30.AM.mov

Lessons Learned

• How file/data is stored in memeory and how to manipulate that!
• Reading file as chunks rather than reading the entire file to memory
• Better use of strings.Builder, bytes.Buffer
• File I/O operations
• ASCII <-> binary converstions
• Video creation using ffmpeg
• RGB Channels, frames and how to create images using the same

Links

Features

• Can encode/decode any file type but it does not re-decode sound, eg: image, zip, pdf, etc.
• Since we are creating lossless image the video does take a bit of space, so this is great for files less than 50Mb. For reference: 10Mb file took ~5-6sec for whole encode-decode process.

Optimizations

• Using file streaming instead of reading everything into memory
• Using flag to receive input parameters from CLI
• Refactored functions

Limitations

• Since the implemetation is depended on video frames to extract data, lossless videos are required. Decoding videos with loss would result in malformed data.
• Implemetation does have streaming of files but during the entire process there are a lot of file read-write operations happening and video files would have a considerable size based on resolution and size of file.
• Time and space for processing are directly linked to file size, greater the size longer the binary video.
• Video files would loss audio in the process but the video is retained correctly.