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The output file is .aek but I can't figure out what to do with it. My Google-fu is failing me this evening. How do you view the output?
by milesf 13y ago
The output file is .aek but I can't figure out what to do with it. My Google-fu is failing me this evening.
How do you view the output?
- gilgoomesh 13y agoThe output is PPM, not AEK (that's Andrew Kensler's initials). Use PPM as the extension (similar to PGM, PNM and others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format). It's not very common in consumer products (too primitive) but you can open in Gimp, Preview.app, IrfanView, XV and lots of others.
- tnorthcutt 13y agoFWIW I was not able to open it with Preview on OS X 10.8
- gilgoomesh 13y agoEep, my mistake. You're right: it doesn't work. I thought I used to open PPMs with Preview back in Mac OS 10.3 or something else ancient. I could be mistaken on that. Oh well. Everyone has Gimp and LibreOffice installed though, right? They both open the file without problems.
- milesf 13y agoAh. LibreOffice's Drawing program opened it. Thanks :)
- eridius 13y agoGraphic Converter can open PPMs, and that used to ship with every Mac. That's probably what you used.
- ubernostrum 13y agoOr just install ImageMagick, and do 'convert card.ppm card.png'.
- Sharlin 13y agoIf you have IM, just use 'display' to open it directly.
- lesterbuck 13y agoYes, same problem. Google suggests it is an Adobe After Effects file. Linux "file" reports it as card.aek: Netpbm PPM "rawbits" image data, size = 512 x 512 Not sure how to view Netpbm (portable bit map).
- carterschonwald 13y agoif you read further, you'll see its supposed to be .ppm, but the article author made a typo :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Pitarou 13y agoIf you're using Linux or OSX, run it like this: ./aek > aek.ppm That will produce an image in .ppm format. ('The world's second-dumbest picture format.') You'll probably have to convert it to a more widely supported format. Make sure you have the netpbm package installed, and then run, say: pbmtopng aek.ppm > aek.bmp
- tnorthcutt 13y agoThe correct command is actually pnmtopng, FWIW.
- Pitarou 13y agoOops!
- ville 13y agoWhat is the worlds dumbest picture format then?
- Sharlin 13y agoRaw data without any header, I suppose. You must know or guess the width and height to properly decode the image.
- evincarofautumn 13y agoGuessing the dimensions of an image with n pixels is equivalent to factoring n, so good luck with that! And only if your luck is really good (prime width and height) will there be a unique solution—actually you still don’t know whether to choose portrait or landscape. It gets even more interesting if you don’t know the number of channels or the pixel format.
- Sharlin 13y agoWell, you can check if the image matches common resolutions and aspect ratios - if there are 307200 pixels, for example, a pretty good guess is that it's 640x480 (or 480x640). You'd need a human to see if the image looks correct - actually, with a simple GUI, it wouldn't take a human very long at all to figure out the correct aspect ratio. This could probably be automated easily enough using some pattern recognition - the "shearing" pattern caused by guessing the width wrong is pretty linear and well-behaving.