I think a generic plugin wuld be very useful - orking somewhat like this:

1. read file; look in 'fingerprint' file for a file extension/header ID bytes match

2. from fingerprints file, find out location of actual data i.e. offset from start (perhaps controlled by a value read from a specific offset in the file itself?)

3. bitprint the actual data and submit

This would be useful because some files have headers that include labels, names, last-played etc. and other things that change the bitprint. Such a plugin could then pull and bitprint the actual data from the file, without including the headers etc.

I know this would be hard to make 'flexibly'; anyone here like to accept the challenge?

The bitcollider does this for mp3s. See the "audio_sha1" field of a mp3 tag. This is a hash of the audio content only. I don't think it would be possible to do this in a generic manner, but it should be done for plugins that handle other filetypes that may contain mutable metadata.

I mean a plugin that reads a config file to check if a file to be bitprinted matches a template - user creatable templates; maybe a page on this site for them? - and then extracts and hashes the data based on that template.

Sorry, I was *not* totally with it when I wrote the first post, it must have been a little hard to understand.

Yes, I know an 'automatic' generic plugin would be impossible.

And yes, I know sha1 from mp3s is from the data area - otherwise, as people change the titles, the bitprint would change :-(

If I knew any C, I would write this myself. However, I don't. (I only know how to use PHP and ->VB(ugh)<-)

I'm not a file formats guru, but I suspect that if the template "language" were to handle arbitrary filetypes it would be quite complex and probably not a win over coding file type specific plugins in C. However, I could easily be wrong. Maybe this is your chance to learn C. :-)