Awesome Pixelflut

Collection of Pixelflut resources.

If you are missing something in this list, please create a PR and add it!

License

Content in this list is licensed under a variety of licenses; a LICENSE file has purposefully been omitted for this reason. The list itself is available under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Implementations
Documentation
- Websites and Domains
Alternate Protocols
Media Coverage
Graphics

Implementations

Please keep these lists alphabetical, and include the creation year (if known), programming language, and primary author(s).

Servers

The original trifecta of servers can be found in defnull’s pixelflut repository.

breakwater by Sebastian Bernauer (Rust, 2022)
pixelflut by defnull (Python, 2012)
Pixelflut.NET by Patagonaa (C#, 2020)
pixelnuke by defnull (C, 2018)
pixelpwnr-server by Tim Visée (Rust, 2018)
pixelvloed by Jan Klopper (Python, 2017 and C, 2019), binary UDP
pixelwar by defnull (Java, 2014)
shoreline by TobleMiner (C, 2018)
uefi-pixelflut by nrdmn (Zig on bare-metal UEFI, 2019)
wellenbrecher by bits0rcerer (Rust, 2023)

TODO: performance comparisons would be interesting to add here.

Clients

Example clients on CCC Göttingen Wiki by defnull (Python, 2012)
Hochwasser by Jan Speckamp and Norwin (Go, 2019), images, text, and patterns
hyperflut by kleines Filmröllchen, fork of pixelpwnr (Rust, 2017), images and video streaming
pixelflut in Bash by C (Bash, 2026), images
pixelbomber by Fabian Wunsch (Rust, 2022), images and video streaming
pixelpwnr by Tim Visée (Rust, 2017), images and animations
pixelvloed by Jan Klopper (JavaScript, 2016 and Python, 2018), binary UDP, random pixels
PixelVloed Client by Hafnium (Python, 2020), binary UDP, random pixels
pongxelflut by kleines Filmröllchen (Rust, 2024), plays Pong
sturmflut by TobleMiner (C, 2017), images and animations

Other

Documentation

Websites and Domains

Not all of these domains host websites (all of the time), but they have been known to point at Pixelflut servers, and sometimes their documentation too.

With website

pixelflut.org (owned by this team)
c3pixelflut.de (owned by bits0rcerer and friends at Chaostreff Flensburg, utilized for Chaos Communication Congress Pixelflut)
pixelflut.rocks (unknown owner)

Without website, for Pixelflut purposes only

pixelflut.online (owned by Jonas, redirects to .org)
pixelflut.at (unknown owner)
pixelflut.xyz (owned by Poeschl, redirects to .org)
pixelflut.nl (owned by Pim de Groot)

Alternate Protocols

The primary Pixelflut protocol, as described in the documentation above, runs via TCP and uses ASCII commands, therefore it is often called ASCII Pixelflut and/or TCP Pixelflut. It trivially extends to use UDP sockets instead.

pixelvloed uses UDP with a custom binary protocol. The server also uses UDP broadcasts to publish server data, supporting auto-discovery.
pixelflut-v6 drops all commands except “set pixel”, and encodes the command data within the lower 64 bits of a pinged IPv6 address. Server implementation.
pingxelflut uses the payload of ICMP(v6) pings to send Pixelflut data in a simplified format. Several implementations exist.
Sampleflut is an audio version of Pixelflut, where clients send audio samples into a fixed-size buffer, and players can connect to an HTTP audio stream for listening. The protocol is very similar (TCP, ASCII-based, bare minimum commands).
slowwave is an intentionally slow extension of Pixelflut with the TOKEN command, which allows the server to severely bandwidth-limit clients (100 pixels per second by default). Slowwave emphasizes the smart drawing and collaboration aspect of Pixelflut over raw network bandwidth and throughput optimization.

Media coverage

Blog posts or other narrative media (articles, videos) that talk about pixelflut in general, or cover specific events or technical challenges.

hackaday.com Online Game Becomes Unexpected PixelFlut
blog.mayflower.de The Art of Performance Tuning: Taking a Pixel Streaming Protocol to Its Limits
medium.com Enterprise Pixelflood :)
codefoundry.de Running Pixelflut in a restricted network

Graphics

See assets for all graphics files.

Poeschl created a suite of Pixelflut graphics; unfortunately the vector files are currently assumed lost. All of these images (antifa.svg, pixelflut-icon.png, pixelflut-sticker.jpg, pixelflut-wallpaper.png) are available under CC-BY-SA 4.0. The sticker has been found at CCC event sticker exchanges in the past.

Logo: