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Microscope vendors have gone to incredible efforts to obfuscate their file formats. Some inventing custom compression codecs. I worked for a company that spent
by klysm 3y ago
Microscope vendors have gone to incredible efforts to obfuscate their file formats. Some inventing custom compression codecs. I worked for a company that spent enormous amounts of time reverse engineering these protocols.
- Ericson2314 3y agoLabs should not be allowed to spend grant money on this bullshit.
- ahns 3y ago:/ [tell me about it...](https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/svs/ https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/svs/)
- yread 3y agoHah SVS is child's play compared to MRXS: https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/openslide-users/2012-July/000373.html https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/openslide-users/2012-...
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI'd hope imagemagick or some other program can at least get the data out into another format. I did not know about openslide before reading that mail, but I'll try to keep it in mind. Here's hoping this eventually gets fixed in a similar sort of way the .mkv format "fixed" video.
- klysm 3y agoI wasn’t going to namedrop in my original comment but oh my the horrors this format brings back.
- dekhn 3y agobioformats2raw https://github.com/glencoesoftware/bioformats2raw https://github.com/glencoesoftware/bioformats2raw handles a wide range of obfuscated formats.
- m463 3y agoI'm wondering if decent standards are created, we'll be able to buy an electron microscope on amazon, just like 3d printers.
- jrockway 3y agoThere are definitely consumer electron microscopes available. I remember a video from a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60I0Z7qCsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60I0Z7qCsU I am not sure if the video actually says the name of the microscope, though, because he was mad at them for not testing it at high altitude where he lived at the time.
- alted 3y agoI believe this is the Voxa Mochii [1]. [1] https://www.mymochii.com/ https://www.mymochii.com/
- jrockway 3y agoLooks like it. Not quite as consumer grade as I expected; "contact us for a quote" = $$$.
- jimmyswimmy 3y agoYou'd want a quote if you're spending that kind of money: https://www.voxa.co/solutions/mochii/faqs https://www.voxa.co/solutions/mochii/faqs How much does one unit cost? Mochii starts at $48K for the imaging only unit. The spectroscopy-enabled version, which provides full featured x-ray spectroscopy and spectrum imaging, is $65K. It has an integrated metal coater option available for $5,000, and we offer a variety of optical cartridge exchange programs that can fit your consumables utilization and pricing needs.
- jrockway 3y agoYeah I kind of thought that if it was on YouTube then it was like $1000 or something. Apparently not.
- michaelmior 3y ago> Some inventing custom compression codecs. I'm probably not being cynical enough here, but this doesn't necessarily imply a desire for obfuscation.
- strangattractor 3y agoYou are not being cynical enough - "Vendor lock in" would be a more appropriate term;)
- eternityforest 3y agoA custom codec seems like it could only be obfuscation or really, really bad design. Codecs are hard, I doubt there are many which are better than the well known ones.
- michaelmior 3y agoWhen you're dealing with a specific subdomain, it's certainly possible you can exploit known properties of data in that domain to achieve better compression than a general purpose algorithm. That said, it's certainly worthwhile benchmarking (de)compression speed and the compression ratio to see if the difference is actually meaningful enough to be worthwhile.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]