Category Archives: glitch art

ffglitch pixel formats

This weekend I was at the Poetic Computation Group Belgium and Greg Berger mentioned doing glitch art with FFmpeg.

Being a former FFmpeg developer myself, I remembered having made quite a bunch of experimentation with it, but it was mostly ephemeral and just for fun. Then I thought to myself: what about turning those bits and pieces of experimentation into blog posts and projects on GitHub?

And so the first project is born into my very new ffglitch repository. The name of the repository suggests more FFmpeg glitch art projects will come, and I hope my laziness doesn’t stop me from doing this (which it likely will).

pix_fmt

https://github.com/ramiropolla/ffglitch/tree/master/pix_fmt

The pix_fmt project consists of doing a whole bunch of incorrect pixel format conversions. If you don’t know what pixel formats are, read up on my previous blog post pixel formats 101.

The project is a script that generates a bunch of combinations for pixel format conversion. For example,  one such conversion takes raw RGB data as input, pretends that data is YUV420p, and reconverts it to RGB. The project does this for all possible input to output pixel format combinations. This amounts to nearly 10000 images, with about 4000 being unique.

To try it out, just do:

$ git clone https://github.com/ramiropolla/ffglitch.git
$ cd pix_fmt
$ python pix_fmts.py <input.png> > makefile
$ make -r -k -jN
$ cd output_dir
$ fdupes --delete --noprompt .

What are the results like? Well, here are some samples (originals first):

libcaca logo:

libcaca-logoyuvj444p_yuv420p12le yuva422p9le_yuv420p16be yuva422p9be_yuv444p14le yuv444p16be_yuv420p14be yuv444p12le_yuv444p16be xyz12be_yuv420p10le  gbrp_yuvj440p gbrp9be_yuv422p10le gbrp9be_bgr48le gbrp12le_yuv420p10le

Tarrafa hackerspace logo with yellow background:

argb_argbyuva444p_yuv422p12le yuv444p16le_yuv422p14le yuv444p16le_yuv422p12le gbrp10be_xyz12le bgr48be_yuv444p14be

Tarrafa hackerspace logo with white background:

argb_argb bgr24_yuv444p.png

Check it out, make your own ffglitch.pix_fmt and post the link in the comments!

Have fun…