# Frame serialization

## Choice of serialization method
To communicate between FPGA-equipped receiver system and writers, 
Jungfraujoch is using binary CBOR encoding with tinycbor library (Intel).
The protocol is compatible with [DECTRIS Stream2](https://github.com/dectris/documentation/tree/main/stream_v2). 
There are minor differences at the moment:

* Pixel mask can be only sent uncompressed
* Only single channel is allowed for images (this only matters for deserialization)
* LZ4 compression is not allowed; Bitshuffle Zstandard is possible
* Few fields are currently absent
* Few extra fields are present - for start image these are inside user_data.

TODO:
* Zero copy deserialization
* Full Stream2 compatibility
* Cleaner structure for image (compressed/uncompressed)