poka.sh

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WIM

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Windows WIM Image Preview.

At a glance
Purpose A Windows Imaging Format file (.wim, .esd, or split .swm): file-based disk images with compressed resources and an XML description.
Extensions .wim
Poka parser poka-wim
Viewer poka-tree-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: high (the reviewer read the code and a test that proves the claim). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-wim/src/main.rs (843 lines) and plugin.json. Ten unit tests and a_corpus_wim_reports_the_images_an_independent_reader_counts, which checks the corpus sample.wim against an independent reader. Covers .wim, .esd and .swm. The tree decodes the 208-byte header (version, compression, chunk size, part numbers, image count, boot index, GUID, flags, integrity and boot metadata) and reads the uncompressed XML resource for each image's name, product, edition, architecture, version, description, creation time and file, directory and byte counts. Judgement: B4: the images are described from the header and XML, but their file trees are not read.

What Poka does not read

  • The images' directory trees (metadata resources) are not read, so no file is listed
  • No resource is decompressed (XPRESS, LZX, LZMS)
  • Split sets (.swm) are not joined
  • The integrity table is detected, not verified

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • roxmltree (used; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust)
  • wim-parser (candidate; MIT; Rust; https://github.com/junjiangao/wim-parser) — Parses WIM header, XML metadata and multiple images; detects XPRESS/LZX; file-content extraction not documented.
  • wimlib (candidate; licence unconfirmed; C; https://github.com/ebiggers/wimlib) — Full read/write/extract WIM library (mirror page); repo ships COPYING, GPLv3 and LGPL files but the split was not confirmed; Rust crate 'wimlib' wraps it.

Sources

  • parsers/poka-wim/src/main.rs
  • parsers/poka-wim/plugin.json