### What any file is, from its bytes alone

- **`wai identify <file>`** (operation `media.inspect`, [extensions/media-identify.md](extensions/media-identify.md)): the
  formats a file's bytes fit, each with the offsets that say so and how far its structure was followed; a container's
  tracks with their codec, size and protection as it states them; the registered capabilities they map to; signatures
  found inside it; and, where no format is recognised, measures that still hold: how its values are spread and the lags at
  which it repeats. `verdict` is `identified`, `ambiguous`, `signature_only` or `unknown`, and there is no confidence
  figure: a candidate's strength says what was checked. Nothing is decoded and no protected track is opened. It reads ISO
  media, Matroska, transport streams, Ogg, FLAC, RIFF, MPEG audio, ADTS, PNG, JPEG, GIF, IVF, YUV4MPEG2, FLV, AV1 OBU and
  Annex B streams and HLS and DASH text, and knows many more by signature. Any size of file costs a bounded amount, and
  every walk has been given hostile bytes. It is in the agent door as `media_inspect`, its results marked
  `untrusted_content`, because a file's author chooses the strings in it.
- The corpus [`identify-conformance/`](identify-conformance/) holds files from real muxers and encoders, with what an
  independent prober reads of them, and negative controls; `identify_verify.py` is a second implementation.

