Little Endian…… what is it?

[Shane Ross]

[Derek Lau] “what does Little Endian do?”

Hunt little buffalo? Live in little tee pees?

Sorry…couldn’t resist. Must be the Indian in me.

Shane

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[David Roth weiss]

Derek,

Both of you should be exporting using Quicktime Movie — current settings. That simply exports at exactly the settings of your timeline, creating a file as good as you can get, no thought needed.

Little Endian is a compression setting that is inaudible to you because your speakers do not have the necessary dynamic range to hear the difference. Don’t mess with it, cuz if you guess wrong you’ll be limiting the information in your audio files unnecessarily.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[David Heidelberger]

Doesn’t endian-ness just refer to the order bits are stored in memory? As a general rule, one doesn’t retain more information than the other, but I could be wrong about this implementation. As a very simplified description, if you had the number 256 (pretend it’s in binary), on a big endian system, it would be stored highest significant digit to lowest: “256.” But on a little endian system, it would be stored lowest significant digit to highest: “652.” It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.

Endian-ness is processor-dependent. Intel-based computers (Mac or PC) used to be Little Endian, PowerPCs (G5, etc) were Big Endian. But I think for quite a while, both have been able to read both file types.

And, incidentally, I learned in my computer science class a few years ago, the big/little endian thing is a reference to Gulliver’s Travels.

– David

[Ed Dooley]

Right you are:
Common file formats and their endian order are as follows:

Adobe Photoshop — Big Endian
BMP (Windows and OS/2 Bitmaps) — Little Endian
DXF (AutoCad) — Variable
GIF — Little Endian
IMG (GEM Raster) — Big Endian
JPEG — Big Endian
FLI (Autodesk Animator) — Little Endian
MacPaint — Big Endian
PCX (PC Paintbrush) — Little Endian
PostScript — Not Applicable (text!)
POV (Persistence of Vision ray-tracer) — Not Applicable (text!)
QTM (Quicktime Movies) — Little Endian (on a Mac!)
Microsoft RIFF (.WAV & .AVI) — Both
Microsoft RTF (Rich Text Format) — Little Endian
SGI (Silicon Graphics) — Big Endian
Sun Raster — Big Endian
TGA (Targa) — Little Endian
TIFF — Both, Endian identifier encoded into file
WPG (WordPerfect Graphics Metafile) — Big Endian (on a PC!)
XWD (X Window Dump) — Both, Endian identifier encoded into file

Ed

[David Heidelberger] “Doesn’t endian-ness just refer to the order bits are stored in memory? As a general rule, one doesn’t retain more information than the other, but I could be wrong about this implementation. As a very simplified description, if you had the number 256 (pretend it’s in binary), on a big endian system, it would be stored highest significant digit to lowest: “256.” But on a little endian system, it would be stored lowest significant digit to highest: “652.” It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea.

Endian-ness is processor-dependent. Intel-based computers (Mac or PC) used to be Little Endian, PowerPCs (G5, etc) were Big Endian. But I think for quite a while, both have been able to read both file types.

And, incidentally, I learned in my computer science class a few years ago, the big/little endian thing is a reference to Gulliver’s Travels.
“

[Chris Borjis]

I got the BIG Indian