pixelpwnr

A quick pixelflut (video) client in Rust for use at 34C3, that pwns whole pixelflut panels.

For a high performance pixelflut server implementation, see:
→ pixelpwnr-server (server)

Note: This is a prototype project. Some things may not work correctly. Or some things may work slow.

Features

• Many concurrent drawing pipes, fast multithreading
• Animated images, with multiple frame images
• Control over render sizes and offset
• Automatic image sizing and formatting
• Faster than most other clients :-)
• Linux, Windows and macOS

Usage

Pixelflut a simple image:

# Flut a simple image.
# - To host 127.0.0.1 on port 8080
# - With the image: image.png
# - With 4 painting threads
# - With the size of the screen (default)
pixelpwnr 127.0.0.1:8080 -i image.png -c 4

# Other CLI syntax is also supported
pixelpwnr "127.0.0.1:8080" --image="image.png" -c=4

Pixelflut an animated image:

# Flut an animated image, with multiple frames.
# - To host 127.0.0.1 on port 8080
# - With the images: *.png
# - With 5 frames per second
# - With 4 painting threads
# - With a size of (400, 400)
# - With an offset of (100, 100)
pixelpwnr 127.0.0.1:8080 -i *.png --fps 5 -c 4 -w 400 -h 400 -x 100 -y 100

Use the --help flag, or see the help section for all available options.

Installation

For installation, Git and Rust cargo are required. Install the latest version of Rust with rustup.

Then, clone and install pixelpwnr with:

# Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/timvisee/pixelpwnr.git
cd pixelpwnr

# Install pixelpwnr
cargo install -f

# Start using pixelpwnr
pixelpwnr --help

# or run it directly from Cargo
cargo run --release -- --help

Or just build it and invoke the binary directly (Linux/macOS):

# Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/timvisee/pixelpwnr.git
cd pixelpwnr

# Build the project (release version)
cargo build --release

# Start using pixelpwnr
./target/release/pixelpwnr --help

Performance & speed optimization

There are many things that affect how quickly pixels can be painted on a pixelflut server.
Some of them are:

• Size of the image that is drawn.
• Amount of connections used to push pixels.
• Performance of the machine pixelpwnr is running on.
• Network interface performance of the client.
• Network interface performance of the server.
• Performance of the pixelflut server.

Things that improve painting performance:

• Use a wired connection.
• Use a LAN connection, closely linked to the pixelflut server. The lower latency the better, due to the connection being over TCP.
• Use as many threads (-c flag) as the server, your connection and your machine allows.
• Paint a smaller image (-w, -h flags).
• Paint in an area on the screen, where the least other things are pained.
• Use multiple machines (servers) with multiple pixelpwnr instances to push pixels to the screen.

Future improvements

This application is still in the prototyping phase, and many things can be improved for significantly better performance and usability. See the TODO file for a list of future improvements.

Help

pixelpwnr --help

pixelpwnr 0.1
Tim Visee <timvisee@gmail.com>
A quick pixelflut client, that pwns pixelflut panels.

USAGE:
    pixelpwnr [OPTIONS] <HOST> --image <PATH>...

FLAGS:
        --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -i, --image <PATH>...    Image paths
    -w, --width <PIXELS>     Draw width (def: screen width)
    -h, --height <PIXELS>    Draw height (def: screen height)
    -x <PIXELS>              Draw X offset (def: 0)
    -y <PIXELS>              Draw Y offset (def: 0)
    -c, --count <COUNT>      Number of concurrent threads (def: CPUs)
    -r, --fps <RATE>         Frames per second with multiple images (def: 1)

ARGS:
    <HOST>    The host to pwn "host:port"

Relevant projects

• pixelpwnr-server (server)

License

This project is released under the GNU GPL-3.0 license. Check out the LICENSE file for more information.