When comparing UltraEdit vs Hex Fiend, the Slant community recommends Hex Fiend for most people. In the question 'What are the best hex editors for Mac?' Hex Fiend is ranked 2nd while UltraEdit is ranked 5th. The Slant team built an AI & it’s awesome Find the best product instantly. Also if your intent is to tank I'd assume you want to be in the front-line in which case Hexblade is going to be vastly superior to Fiend. I'd think just casting Armor of Agathys on yourself (which wouldn't stack with Fiend's Dark One's Blessing) and just try and pull as many enemies towards you as possible. If they hit you then you have some. The official name of the app Hex Fiend Is there a supported version available on a stable release channel? Yes Proposed App Status Yes, full native Apple Silicon support as of v2.14.0 Proposed App Category Developer Tools An Official App. A fast and clever open source hex editor for Mac OS X by the legendary ridiculousfish. Insert, delete, rearrange. Hex Fiend does not limit you to in-place changes like some hex editors. Work with huge files. Hex Fiend can handle as big a file as you’re able to create. Hex Fiend is designed to work efficiently with large amounts (64 bits worth) of data. As such, it can work with arbitrarily large files without reading the entire file into memory. This includes insertions, deletions, and in-place editing. Hex Fiend can also efficiently save.

Glitching videos with data corruption can be a tricky process. This is owing to the fact that video formats are substantially more complex than image formats. Since video formats contain audio and timing information in addition to visual information corrupting the wrong section of a video file can quickly render the file unplayable rather than delightfully distorted.

This tutorial will focus on glitching the popular MP4 and MOV formats containing video compressed with the H.264 standard. If the video you want to destroy is not in MP4 or MOV format already an easy way to convert it is to upload it to YouTube, let them convert it, and then download the result. If a video doesn’t set off any copyright claims you can download it from the YouTube Video Manager in MP4 format.

Get started by making a copy of your MOV or MP4 and open the copy in a hex editor — never edit the original file. If you don’t have a hex editor installed there are some freeware options listed at the bottom of this post. Hex editors allow us to view and edit the bytes of a file using hexadecimal. Editing the file using hex rather than text allows greater flexibility since we’re no longer restricted to text characters (which are each represented by two hex digits).

We know that we’re looking at an MP4 or MOV file when we see the text ftypqt starting on the fifth byte of the file as illustrated in the example below.

The MP4 and MOV (Quicktime) formats utilize a similar structure, the file is broken down into atoms or blocks of data. The atom which contains the raw frame and audio data can be identified by it’s atom type string, which in this case is mdat (short for media data).

The data contained within the mdat atom is comprised of chunks, which are comprised of nal units, which are comprised of slices. For the purposes of this tutorial we won’t delve that deep. Finding the mdat atom can be done by searching the file for the string “mdat” as seen in the above image. Notice that the contents of the mdat atom seem quite random when viewed in a hex editor, in contrast the contents of the other atoms in MP4 and MOV files are very structured. With this information we can easily find the end of the mdat atom by scrolling through it (or up from the bottom of the file) to see where the data starts to look random as illustrated in the image below.

Here we can see that the mdat atom is followed by the moov atom (and an mvhd atom after that), this is not always the case as the order of the atoms can be different. What’s important to note though is that the file is visibly more structured after the mdat atom, this is how we can identify where the mdat atom ends. The mdat atom, in all cases, will either continue to the end of the file or it will be followed by another atom identified by a 4-character string such as the moov atom does in the above example. Using this method we can identify both the start and the end of the mdat atom, and in turn where we can corrupt only the mdat atom’s contents and have a fair chance of the video still being playable.

Once we’ve identified the boundaries of mdat atom we can begin to copy and paste, replace or edit portions of the raw hex data (or the text ASCII data, either will work) of the video and check the result along the way by attempting to play the video. Making backup copies after every successful change will avoid heartaches when, not if, a misstep renders the video unplayable.

Some notes on successful corrupting:

• It doesn’t take much corruption to add bizarre distortion to a video, even corrupting as little as 10% of a file, a couple of bytes here and there, has the potential to send playback into a wild frenzy.
• While not required, most data in the mdat will be in sequence so if we want to corrupt a specific portion of the video we can estimate the offset of the data for that portion is in the mdat based on its time.
• The mdat atom will also contain raw audio data so if the audio becomes distorted during playback we know we’ve gone too far, or started too early, in the mdat atom.
• Copying and pasting hex within nal units is probably the best way to corrupt H.264 video data as you’ll be shuffling valid data around rather than adding outright gibberish.
• As mentioned previously the mdat is comprised of chunks, as chunks and the nal units contained within them have structure it’s best to corrupt small portions of data in various spots rather than large swaths. Corrupting large regions of data will inevitably cross over structure boundaries and destroy important information regarding the type of nal unit or slice.
• To stay inside nal units look for hex 67, 68 or 00 00 01 as these sequences can denote the beginning of a new nal unit.
• This definitely falls under the bull in a china shop category of datamoshing video so don’t be discouraged if it takes a couple of restarts to get a playable result.

The video included in this post was glitched using this technique, however the audio was slowed down using traditional video editing.

As with any glitch-by-corruption technique, it requires a soft touch — too little has no effect, too much can destroy the file, but just enough results in glorious, glorious corruption. #corruptabsolutely

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I am the author of a tool that generates wxHexEditor tags and annotations for Postgres relation files -- pg_hexedit:

I've invested quite a lot of effort in it, and it would be nice to have support for multiple hex editors. That was anticipated to some degree:

Hex Editor Windows 10

I understand why you favor a declarative template format for describing files with tags -- that probably scales really nicely. What I'm doing is pretty grotty, but works surprisingly well in practice. I procedurally generate a description of each file in a shell script, and then open the file in wxHexEditor. I'm generating huge XML files, which is slow, but there are simple workarounds to get acceptable performance.

wxHexEditor doesn't support declarative tags. But even if it did I might not want to use them; the on-disk format of PostgreSQL is much more complicated than most file formats, and isn't supposed to be consumed by third party tools. Writing a C program that uses the struct definitions from the server itself makes the complexity quite manageable -- the tool is basically feature complete, even though I haven't spent a huge amount of time on it.

Mac Hex Viewer

That said, it would be great if I could adapt pg_hexedit to a hex editor that had some kind of 'best of both worlds' support for tags - tags that can be generated lazily and on-demand, when a portion of the file needs to be drawn or redrawn. This would be easy to adapt to -- Postgres relation files always consist of a series of 8KiB blocks/pages. My tool can easily generate tags for any single block without knowing any special context or having any expensive-to-generate state -- I just need a block number (i.e. an 8KiB-aligned byte offset).