Extended Binary Waterfall

This program reads arbitrary computer files as raw audio and video streams, resulting in what's sometimes known as a binary waterfall. The “extended” part of it is the inclusion of a detailed walktrough of the fragments, chunks or subfiles that the target file may have.

Warning

This program is still in development. Some code is still untested, and errors are expected to happen when running this software.

Dependencies

• Required
  • .NET 9 SDK
    • It hasn't been tested with older versions but it is probably compatible with them. You can try lower the version manually in the csproj file.
• Optional
  • FFmpeg libraries (for the FFmpeg exporter)
    • In Windows 10/11, use the following command to install FFmpeg:

       winget install "FFmpeg (Shared)"

      Once installed, restart the command line and make sure the PATH environment variable is updated with the FFmpeg libraries path.
    • Alternatively, you can manually download the libraries at CODEX FFMPEG (make sure to download the “shared” variant). Once downloaded, move the DLLs to a known path (e.g. C:\ffmpeg).
  • Unifont
    • Some Linux distros have the option to install this font via their respective package manager, but in Windows a manual download is required.
    • Make sure to install both the default font and the “upper” variant for emoticons.
  • wimlib for WIM file listings.
  • minidump Python module for Windows Minidump memory region parsing.

Important

When using Unifont, make sure to install the TTF format instead of OTF. It seems that Unifont contains OTF CFF2 tables that makes the text rendering library throw an exception.

You can download the TTF version from an unofficial repository since it doesn't get officially released by Unifoundry as a TTF file anymore.

See the relevant SixLabors Fonts issue and pull request for this specific problem.

Build and Run

Use run.sh to quickly (build if necessary, then) run the program.

Alternatively, standard dotnet build/dotnet run commands apply:

Use dotnet build from the repository's path, then execute dotnet run --project Unai.ExtendedBinaryWaterfall.Cli to run the program.

Usage

Quick Start

The following commands will assume your command line working directory is located at the resulting binaries from the build process. If you're on Windows, the executable will be suffixed with .exe.

Execute this command to get information about the arguments that can be used:

Unai.ExtendedBinaryWaterfall.Cli --help

When using run.sh, the command can be simplified to:

./run.sh --help

Examples

Example 1

Read an ISO file and save the result to a video file called result.mkv (requires FFmpeg):

Unai.ExtendedBinaryWaterfall.Cli /path/to/file.iso --exporter=ffmpeg --output=result.mkv

Example 2

Read a GameMaker archive file and preview the result in an SDL window:

Unai.ExtendedBinaryWaterfall.Cli /path/to/data.win

SDL is the default exporter if none is specified.

Example 3

Read a .dll file and preview the FFmpeg encoding result with standard output redirection:

Unai.ExtendedBinaryWaterfall.Cli "C:\Windows\system32\shell32.dll" --exporter=ffmpeg | ffplay -f matroska -

When no -o/--output argument is specified, EBW will default to the standard output.

Warning

Some command line interfaces like PowerShell will require a proper standard I/O encoding suitable for binary streams. Otherwise you will end up with “corrupted” files.