you call linguists, cryptologists, expert in encoding schemes, scientists etc etc... decoding unknown and complex data communication is not a one man job. on earth alone, several disciplines are needed to decode just for say, Egyptian hieroglyphs
Hollywood makes first contact with aliens a breeze, but it's not.
I'm trying to train myself to decode everything I can access just in case ... and it's so damn hard, as you can see here.
Four bloody weeks just to sniff the USB protocol, figure out where frames start and end, and still don't understand how they are compressed.
I have a purpose for that device, it's not just a game, but it's also a challenge to understand how complex certain things are in reality.
I mean, I love comics, I've read tons of comics and watched hundreds of movies, and in a Superman movie you see Lex Luthor able to handle how to decode an alien algorithm to unlock the door of an alien spaceship and immediately access the door. . entire Cryptorian database to create the worst villain ever, Doomsday, whose birth has only one purpose: Superman's death.
If you watch the movie, in less than 48 hours
Lex Luthor was also able to decode a super complex Cryptorian technology of a bio-weapon classified as "only generals can access it", and he easily bypassed the security level and got it. . .
Insanely bright! Is he a super-ultra-sapiens human being? the evolution of human beings, hence more intelligent, clever and smart than Einstein?
Crazy Hollywood! This part sucks because it's too far from reality
your level 5 lossless compression looks like not a compresion at all (see attached)
how come a finger print encoded into a skull is something you've not told us...
No, they are two different images. The one with the finger is the only one frame I can capture with a known input image.
The skull one comes from a different source, which I cannot control.
But, if it's not compressed, then it's interesting because it means that sometimes it shoots an uncompressed frame
So, I have to look at the control frame to see if there is a special command to issue a not compressed shot.
I have to improve the C source that tries to capture frames (based on libusb, on Linux). It's not easy, there are a lot of control packets in the middle.
But images are only transported on bulk-frames (up to 500Kbyte) and I cannot simply ignore everything else because I have to check the compression level, which usually precedes the bulk frame.
Ctrl frame, it sometimes report the compression level, a number from 1 to 5
bulk frame, 1 of 4, sometimes it's 1 of 2, sometimes it's 1 of 1, it depends on the compression level and on the image size