How does a stored image or video appear in binary on the hard drive?

binary

Solution

As for how it is physically stored, it depends on the technology of your storage device. For a hard disk drive you can read about it on Wikipedia.

The next layer is how the controller on the storage device sends the data to the motherboard.

Then how the motherboard sends the data to the operating system.

Then how the operating system stores the data on the disk (what file system it uses; NTFS is common in modern Windows installations.)

Finally, what you'll see when reading the data is groups of 8 bits (bytes) which are basically 8 on/off flags, which together form 256 possible combinations. Which is why most image formats are stored with colors varying from 0-255 for each channel (red, green, blue.) Most raw formats are stored linearly, so you can actually try reading them yourself. A raw image where the first pixel is red (assuming it stores the pixels left-to-right, top-to-bottom) would look like this in bits:

11111111 00000000 00000000
red      green    blue

For more information, you'll have to be more specific.

Problem

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