NAME
rsbep — Reed-Solomon FEC (forward error correction) with byte-spreading
SYNOPSIS
rsbep [-d] [-v] [-q] [-B x] [-D y] [-R z]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the rsbep tool.
This manual page was written for the Debian distribution because the
original program does not have a manual page.
rsbepis a tool that protects the data-stream from stdin with Reed-
Solomon FEC (forward error correction) and additional it spreads the
bytes of the resulting blocks out to give some protection against burst
errors (e.g from tape-recordings).
The Reed-Solomon-code is from Phil Karn (see REAMDE.rsbep.RS32), and
it’s a special version for i386 (and compatible) to get enough
performance for realtime encoding/decoding making it suitable for use
with the tool "dvbackup" - which requires 3,6MByte/sec of data to feed
the MiniDV-Camcorder. It is hardwired for (255,223)-RS.
The burst error protection is done by encoding ERR_BURST_LEN blocks of
255 bytes and placing the Bytes of an RS-block with distance
ERR_BURST_LEN withing a buffer of ERR_BURST_LEN*255 bytes size. (This
is the minimum output size of rsbep)
During decoding the blocks are reassembled and then decoded by RS32.
If any error occured in the data it is corrected if possible, otherwise
written as is, the number of corrected failures and uncorrectable
blocks is printed if >0 or according to commandline options (v,q).
The first line of each encoded output block contains
"rsbep 255 223 765 MAGIC_NUM"
which is the identifier for rsbep, the Reed-Solomon block-size, data-
size and the ERR_BURST_LEN (that is a number >=block-size and exact
multiple of block-size). MAGIC_NUM is used to resynchronize if the
stream is completly broken, which makes it possible to recover later
files in your (tar-)archive.
ERROR CORRECTION
Now how much errors can it correct?
RS(255,223) can correct up to 16 incorrect bytes in unknown positions.
However, the problem is, that typical communications and storage errors
are also burst errors - which is that a lot of subsequent bytes are
lost. That would mean, if more than 16 subsequent bytes are damaged,
the data are irreparably damaged.
The method above spreads those bytes so far out, that up to
16*255*3=12240 subsequent bytes can get garbled without loosing
valuable data at all!
Test with dvbackup and the LongPlay mode of my camcorder showed that
more than enough to use it - it corrected Kilo-Bytes of errors in Giga-
Bytes of data.
Of course there is a probability, that the failure has just that rate,
that it hit’s always the bytes of the same block - i leave it to the
mathematicians among you to calculate it ;-)
LIMITATIONS
* It does’nt make use of "erasures" - that would double the recover
rate.
* It is hardcoded for RS(255,223)*(<=255) bytes, if you change the code
you may not be able to recover old data with different RS-values
* The resynchronisation takes so much CPU that it will fillup the
buffer soon and anything will fall apart, (running the program
’offline’ might help) - it needs a lot of work to be really of use...
* Failures in the header-line might have drastic consequences,
mathematically spoken: Those bytes contain more information
* The error correction works only from stream with failures, not
erasures, dvbackup has the option ’-r’ to take care of this to the
extend MiniDV allows.
OPTIONS
-d Decode. The default is to encode.
-v Verbose. Talks about the errors it encounters and gives
statistics at the end.
-q Quiet. Output only a minimum of messages.
-B x Override the default Reed-Solomon blocksize of 255 and use
’x’ instead.
-D y Override the default Reed-Solomon datasize of 223 and use ’y’
instead.
-R z Override the default ERR_BURST_LEN (used to spread the data)
of 765 and use ’z’ instead.
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Robert Jordens jordens@debian.org for
the Debian system (but may be used by others). The text is based on
information from Guido Fiala. Permission is granted to copy, distribute
and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public
License, Version 2. On Debian systems, the full text of this license
can be found in the file /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.