An Answer, at Last, to the Image Puzzel

I posted a cryptic image, like the one above, a while back. I meant to post a solution sooner than this but hey, you're getting it now. Only one person contacted me with a right answer, nitro2k01. I thoroughly expected him to get it so that came as no surprise. To the others who attempted though, thanks for trying :)

Ok, when is a picture not a picture? When it's a video of course! This will either amaze or bore you, or annoy you that I'm making such a big deal out of something you've known for years. The image above is actually a two dimensional representation of the stream data of the video below. To keep the file size of the image down, it's fairly heavily compressed, but it's still viewable.


"It's a fake!"

It's not just a graphical reproduction of the video though, the 123.63KB PiNG file actually is the video! [N.B. because vimeo.com re-encodes video, the embedded video isn't the exact same video as the image, but you can download the original AVI file from it's vimeo page, if you want to check it out.]

Ok so, how do you do the magic then. Well to "decode" the image above (in Windows), just save a copy of it first. Load it up in your favourite image editing software. Do nothing except save it as a RAW file. Go to that file and rename the extension to "avi". Double click it, and as long as you have the Xvid codec installed, it should play away the exact same as the embedded video here.

Converting video (or any other file type!) to an image is a bit more involved. First, you change the extension of the video to "raw". Then you load it up in your image editing software. It will ask for dimensions for the image it will generate. Basically, you need to figure out a length and width which when multiplied together will equal the total size, in bits, of the original file. You can make the image slightly too big just to be sure, in case you're worried. Once that's done save it as an uncompressed "png" file and you're done.

Like I said at the start of the last paragraph, you can do this conversion to any file type! I was amazed by this procedure a few years back when I heard about it first. The technicalities behind it were interesting, but so were the prospective uses of technique. I imagined storing my files on all those free image hosting sites, that is, until I realised most have a 1MB cut off limit for image sizes. Still though, it's good for sharing things like ebooks, although the RAR concatenation technique is more favourable.

[The video clip is taken from an old Australian children's series, "The Girl From Tomorrow", one of my favorite shows as a child.]