Case Studies on ebyte.org

EByte Case Study Flipping and Editing a Real BMP Image

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BMP is about as plain as image formats get, which makes it a good test of whether a schema can describe a real file down to the last byte. This case study made a tiny bitmap with Python’s Pillow library, read it with the released ebyte 0.1.1 binary, edited it four ways and broke it five ways. Every number below is what the tools printed.

The image is 5 pixels wide and 3 tall: a red stripe on top, green in the middle, blue at the bottom. Pillow saved it as a 102-byte, 24-bit BMP. That’s a 14-byte file header, a 40-byte info header and 48 bytes of pixels. Five pixels at 3 bytes each make 15 bytes a row, and BMP pads every row to a multiple of 4, so each row carries one extra zero byte.

EByte Case Study Inspecting and Editing a Real ZIP Archive

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A ZIP file is a good test of whether a schema can follow a real format’s bookkeeping. Every file inside it is described twice: once in a local header just before its data, and again in a central directory near the end. A short end record then says where that directory starts. This case study built a one-file ZIP with Python’s zipfile module, read it with the released ebyte 0.1.1 binary, edited it and then fed it archives it wasn’t built for.

EByte Case Study Reading and Editing a Real WAV File

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The example that ships with EByte is a made-up format. This case study uses a real one: a WAV audio file, made by Python’s standard wave module and read with the released ebyte 0.1.0 binary, downloaded from GitHub like anyone else would get it. Everything below, every number and every error, is what that binary actually printed.

The file is a tenth of a second of a 440 Hz tone, mono, 16-bit, 8,000 samples a second. That makes 1,644 bytes: a 44-byte header and 1,600 bytes of samples. The Linux archive’s checksum matched SHA256SUMS before anything ran.

EByte Case Study Reading Every Chunk of a WAV File

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first WAV case study used a schema that knew exactly three chunks in a fixed order. Real WAV files aren’t that tidy. Recorders and editors add a LIST chunk with a title and the software name, and some put it before the audio, some after. EByte 0.2.0 adds a repeat field for this, and this case study tries it on a WAV file with metadata, using the released ebyte 0.2.0 Linux binary downloaded from GitHub. Its checksum matched SHA256SUMS before anything ran.