This was an idea I had back in the days of Naptster.  At the turn of the century, it was common to listen to an "acquired" music file only to find it was missing a few seconds at the end due to a prematurely stopped download.  Some video formats would refuse to play at all if the moov atom at the end of the file was missing.  I wondered if it would be possible to make a file format which was…

Terence Eden

A custom file format called RFF (Random File Format) is proposed and implemented, designed to be intrinsically fragile to partial downloads or corruption. The format stores data blocks in shuffled order, with each block containing a header indicating data length and a pointer to the next block's location. The file ends with a pointer to the first block, meaning the entire file must be intact to decode it. Python encoder and decoder implementations are provided, along with sample encoded files to try decoding.