Pixelbomber

A program to nuke pixelflut servers

This client is largely inspired by pixelpwnr, although I made heavy modifications to decrease the bottlenecks.

Installation

Either using cargo:

cargo install pixelbomber

or by cloning and then building:

git clone https://github.com/fabi321/pixelbomber.git
cd pixelbomber
cargo build --release

Features

• Concurrent writing pipes
• Animated images with consecutive images
• Control over render sizes and offsett
• Faster than pixelpwnr (in my case by more than a Factor of 8)
• Linux, Windows and MacOS
• Same cli as pixelpwnr
• Support for both gray pixel command as well as offset command, enable with --offset and --gray
• Support for automated feature and size detection, on by default
• Support for binary pixel commands in the PBxyrgba format (x and y are u16 le encoded)
• Support for input streams
• Suopport for v4l cameras
• Fast image to pixel commands encoder

Get images from stream

By using - as sole image file path, you can pipe in images from stdin. Pixelbomber expects bitmap files as input. You can specify, how many images can be processed in parallel with the --workers flag.

Example using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -re -i <video_file> -f image2pipe -c:v bmp - | cargo run --release -- <host> -

Some ffmpeg tips:

• use -re if the input is a video file. This forces ffmpeg to play it at most at realtime
• use -stream_loop -1 before -i to repeat a video indefinitely

Tradeoff

If you want to only loop a static video, specifying the video frames as images is faster, as it only encodes them once.

Get images from camera

By using /dev/video* as sole image file path, you can use v4l cameras as input. You can also use --test-green-screen to get the current pixel value on position 0,0, and use that value with --green-screen to filter out the green screen.

Tip: OBS has a virtual camera feature.

Get images from video

By only supplying one file, and using the --video flag, pixelbomber can read all frames from that video as images. This will result in pixelbomber precompiling all images into commands, and fluting them afterward. WARNING: This may consume large amounts of RAM (~50GB for 1min FullHD 30fps video). Pixelbombewr will stop encoding new frames if the free system memory drops below 1GB. The number of frames processed in parallel is configured via the --workers flag.

Comparison with stream method

Compared to reading from stdin, this method uses less cpu while fluting and doesn't drop any frames. It does use large amounts of RAM though.

Example

In the examples folder, you can find an example usage of the Service struct, enabling interactive applications. This makes use of image processing pipelines to do the heavy lifting, just focusing on the actual application logic. It connects to localhost:1234 and reflects off any red pixels (as well as the world border).

Run it with

cargo run --release --example bouncy_ball