Analyser Development

14 April 2002

Although we are still working on the encrypted disk system, various things have been done to the analyser in the last few days.

• Various generic processing speedups.
• Analysation now supports a fast mode and a deep mode.

There are various “escape points” where processing aborts the decoding of one specific format (using the descriptor), and continues with the next one. In this mode, unknown or similar formats are usually not detected. Therefore selecting a format for a track that is not an exact match (taking into account any media errors) normally results in the format being rejected or a stream/recording format being selected. This new way of analysation is very fast, for example a dump of “Virus” analysed on a P3 450 setup is about 50 seconds compared to the original analysation taking 2.5 minutes.

In deep mode the original analyzer behaviour is preserved that is able detect similarities with all the described formats.

These changes are the side effect of some code reorganization needed for the encrypted disk system that is still being worked on, not just for the fun of it!