Files and Storage Formats - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 297

Without the structured analysis that a utility like Dumpster provides, you have to navi-
gate through a hex dump like the one shown in Figure 16-13. It is possible but it's a lot of
hard work.
Figure 16-14 shows a similar display from a Tektronix analyzer application that you
can run on Windows XP:

16.10.3 Viewing the Bit Stream

The listing on page 299 is an alternative display showing the beginning of an MPEG-4 bit
stream decoded down to the bit level. You can see how the header contains a variety of
useful information indicated by the symbolic names in the right-hand column. The area
on the left shows the binary values for the bit stream.

16.11 Solving Problems by Using Compression Tools

If you are trying to record content off air, then it is likely to be arriving at your desktop in
a transport stream and encoded using MPEG-2.
The El-Gato Eye TV boxes are neat solutions to delivering video off air straight to the
Mac OS desktop. In record mode, the off-air program stream is dumped into a cache inside
the Eye TV application. You can edit this to trim off the unwanted portions and export it
to a QuickTime file. On the Windows platform, a variety of other alternatives exist such as
Hauppauge WinTV PCI cards and its supporting software. With the growth in home-
media systems, other alternative solutions are being released all the time.

Figure 16-13 Screen shot from a hex dump application.