Argus binary format specification

[Carter Bullard]

Hey An,
We don’t recommend that you try to parse the binary format outside of the client libraries, because of the encryption and compression that can be applied to the stream and the file data elements.  We suggest that you use the client library to parse the streams/files and then process the records as you wish.

The unencrypted / uncompressed format is documented in the two files ./include/argus_def.h and ./include/argus_out.h.  For open source Argus up to V3.0, the first 128 bytes will be an Argus Management Record, and then after that the 4-byte TLV header will tell you what type of record to decode and its length.  Each record is a collection of TLV data segment records, where each DSR starts with a 4-byte header.   These DSR headers have differing formats depending on the data types that are contained and their length requirements (some have an 8, 16 or 24-bit length, some have the data in the header) so it can be a little complicated if you haven’t done this before.   There are XML descriptions for V2 on the web site … V3 is basically the same, but with more DSRs.

Definitely don’t think that decoding the records yourself is the best way to go, since there are 100+ data elements, etc ...  You’ll just be replicating the code in the clients.  I suspect that any implementation will still fall under the GPL for argus and the client code, at least that is the design and intent of the Argus Project.

If you are doing this for a Lincoln Labs contract, we have commercial code that matches the argus that the US gov’t and others are using … that maybe a better starting point for your project, since these groups are not always using the open source Argus.

Hope all is most excellent,
Carter

> On Mar 31, 2017, at 9:43 PM, Tran, An - 0558 - MITLL <atran at ll.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am looking for the argus binary format specification.  We are currently trying to process these files using custom software and is looking to parse out the file in our codebase.  Is there a data specification for the binary files documented somewhere?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> An

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